Metamorphosis
by bethsaida
Summary: When a series of failed rescue attempts separates her from the rest of the group, Alice Munro learns the price of survival. An alternate ending told from multiple perspectives.
1. The Chase and its Aftermath

_Run._

The earth pounded beneath his feet. The dying sun stained the western sky with blood as Chingachgook raced through the grass like a snake.

_The world is running to the rhythm of the never-ending chase_

A light tap on his shoulder, and his son was gone, gone to chase after the colonel's golden-haired daughter.

_Prey escapes and predator starves_

He couldn't see his son. The green fabric of his shirt had vanished into the trees.

_Predator strikes and devours prey_

A glint of metal on the cliff. Uncas emerged on the ravine, and four Huron warriors leaped down from the rocks to ambush him.

_There is no victory_

The scream of a musket split the air. He saw his son fall

_You will run the chase until you die_

and he raced up the steep rock face, gripping his tomahawk so tightly it pierced his hand with splinters. Chingachgook raced in pursuit of death.

_Run._

CORA RAN THROUGH THE TREES with a speed she did not know she possessed. The torn sleeves of her white blouse trailed behind her, now red with blood from their two-day trek to Huron country. A painful stitch was expanding rapidly down her side, and her arm throbbed where Nathaniel's fingers had dug into it as he dragged her away from the Huron camp with a grip tight enough to cut off circulation.

Nathaniel. He was far away, he had left her behind, along with Chingachgook and Uncas and Alice. Nathaniel, who had shot her friend and would-be lover Duncan so they wouldn't have to hear his screams as the flames of some twisted system of justice consumed his body. Nathaniel, who had gripped her arm with the same tense urgency when he whispered her father's fate into her ear two nights ago: _"Dead…I saw him fall…a Huron cut out his heart." _They had all left her behind, and she had nothing but stark memories chasing her steps. So Cora kept running, because she knew the moment she stopped running they would overtake her and she would drown.

She hardly remembered to slow down when she caught sight of him standing frozen on the ravine. He was staring at a spot a few feet in front of him, where Chingachgook knelt over Uncas' body. Four dead Huron warriors were sprawled carelessly on the ground. Chingachgook's tomahawk lay abandoned on the grass. It was clean. She looked at Nathaniel and with a start realized it was the first time she had seen him look scared.

"We're too late," she whispered. Slowly, Uncas stumbled to his feet. He brushed off his father's arm.

"Fine," he said, his breathing short and labored. "I'm fine." He leaned against the rock face. Dark blood stained his hands and his clothes, but Cora could not tell if it belonged to him or the dead Hurons. "I lost them," he said through gritted teeth. He glanced up at her and immediately looked away, but not before Cora saw a flash of something else beneath his exhaustion, something that resembled agony, or an apology.

The pounding in her ears started to subside. She felt her heart slowing down. The red sun seemed to hang suspended behind the trees, casting its silent light on the first fallen leaves of summer. Cora stared at the three men standing motionless beside her as the world screeched to a halt.

THEY SLEPT IN THE GLADE beneath the cliffs that night. Chingachgook even allowed them the luxury of a fire. No one took much comfort from it. A fire meant no one was looking for them, but the bright flames were a painful reminder that their quarry had escaped and was now miles, perhaps even leagues, away.

The Hurons had fled by canoe. Any pursuit tonight was out of the question. They were mentally and physically spent. Even if they weren't, tracking in the dark was nearly impossible. Chingachgook said their best chance was to wait until morning to look for traces of the Huron party, and everyone had silently agreed.

Uncas withdrew to a far corner near the trees to take first watch. He moved lightly, clenching his teeth as he walked. He wouldn't be using his right arm again anytime soon. He knew he ought to be grateful he could walk at all, but the gash in his side reminded him that the degree of an injury's seriousness and the degree of pain it caused only occasionally corresponded. As he scanned the horizon he fingered his musket and tried to think of maneuvers he could use to compensate for his useless arm because it was easier than thinking about anything else.

A soft footstep brushed against the grass. Uncas didn't turn around. He knew who made it, and it was the last person he wanted to see.

"You're hurt. You should rest," his brother said quietly. "I can take over." He was speaking Mahican, which at the moment made Uncas feel an uncharacteristic desire to strangle him. Nathaniel either didn't notice his annoyance or didn't care. He walked forward and sat beside him on the damp ground. For a few moments neither one spoke. Finally Nathaniel broke the silence.

"What were you thinking, going after them on your own?" he demanded. Uncas kept his gaze fixed on the trees, hoping his brother would take the hint. He didn't.

"Listen to me!" Nathaniel said fiercely, grabbing his unwounded shoulder. "Those men were trained to kill, and there were thirteen of them. You're lucky you weren't gutted like Munro. You should have waited for us."

"Like you, _netohcon_?" Uncas observed dryly. He deliberately used the address of a younger brother to an older one, not out of respect, but out of irritation. "Like you waited for us when you helped Jack and the rest of the militia escape?"

Nathaniel looked taken aback. Uncas did not lose his temper very often, so his father and brother both knew whenever he did he was completely serious. Nathaniel waited a moment before responding. "I couldn't let you get involved," he replied in a low voice. "You know that."

"Did you think I'd try to stop you?"

"No, I thought you would join me, and then I'd have that on my conscience," his brother answered. "Do you think I could have faced our father if I'd dragged you into Munro's garrison too?"

"We cared as much about the Camerons as you did," Uncas said coldly. "You had no right to go behind our backs. Or were you wondering why our father hasn't spoken to you since we left the fort?" To his satisfaction, Nathaniel looked away. He glanced at their father, who sat unmoving with his back against a black tree.

"Our father could live without me," Nathaniel said finally with some effort. "It would have destroyed him if you had died."

"You lied, my brother," Uncas retorted.

"_Naugheesum_," Nathaniel said urgently. He used the elder-brother form of address, but Uncas couldn't detect any sarcasm in his voice. "It's not your job to die for anyone." He waited for Uncas to reply, but Uncas returned to scrutinizing the foliage. After a brief pause Nathaniel did take the hint and wordlessly slipped away.

Uncas watched him out of the corner of his eye. Nathaniel paused at the fire where Cora had fallen asleep. The flames cast dark shadows on her exhausted face. She shivered involuntarily despite the warm air. In the absence of blankets, Nathaniel sat down next to her and gently stoked the flames. Without warning Uncas felt the dull ache he had been trying to suppress all night rise in his chest.

Uncas could not work out exactly what he felt for Alice Munro. Fragile, terrified, completely out of her element, he had seen all that the first time he had laid eyes on her during the Huron attack on the George Road. But he had seen something else too. Something inside her was struggling.  
_  
"Are you all right?"_ she had whispered to her father the chaotic night they crept behind the French trenches into Fort William Henry. They seemed like such useless words. He could see it in her eyes, though. A flicker of light so faint, Uncas thought if he breathed it would vanish. A small, insignificant thing. Forgettable, until that night in the cavern beneath the falls when he pulled her back from the edge, looked into her eyes and saw nothing at all. It was as though she had fallen into a dark abyss, and he could not call her back.

He supposed it made little difference now. Somehow the Huron had caught sight of him coming after her, and he had been sensible and cowardly enough to send four of his men to intercept him. Uncas did not even know if she had seen him. The thought of what was happening to her now made him feel sick.

Looking back, it seemed absurd. They hadn't really shared anything. A couple sentences, a few brief glances here and there. Uncas ran through the whole spectrum of emotions again and eventually settled on regret.

THE SKY WAS STILL DARK when Chingachgook woke them. He tapped Cora lightly on the shoulder, and she felt her stiff joints revolt as she sat up.

They dismantled the camp in silence. There wasn't much to do but dispose of the smoldering remains of last night's fire, and even that felt like a meaningless gesture. All the people who might have wanted to track them were long gone by now.

It took less than an hour to reach the spot where the Hurons had escaped the night before. Their canoes had left fresh grooves in the dirt. Uncas knelt down to examine them. "None of the tracks lead away from the river. They all left," he said impassively. "We'll have to look downriver to see where they docked." He winced slightly as he got to his feet. Cora resisted the impulse to walk forward and offer him her arm. He would understand it was a kind gesture, but he would not welcome it.

"Let's hope they didn't dock on the other side, because there isn't a crossing for twenty miles," Nathaniel said grimly. He shouldered his rifle and followed his brother downstream.

Cora gazed across the river at the endless expanse of trees on the eastern bank. A thin glimmer of light emerged over the canopy, flooding the forest with an ominous orange glow. _A new day_, she thought with a dull sense of depression. She turned away before the rising sun burned her eyes.


	2. The Awakening

Alice stared at the rapids and thanked whatever God existed in the Americas that they had taken canoes.

She knew what she should be feeling. She ought to feel terrified – if not of the straight-backed Huron in front of her who wore her father's sword like a war trophy, at least of the other eight men who followed him. They had helped slaughter hundreds of women and children just three days ago outside Fort William Henry, and they would undoubtedly do the same to her once they docked. At the very least she should feel some measure of grief for the people she had lost. But after two nights and two days of walking and standing and walking again, all she could think of was how wonderful it felt to sit down.

The Hurons paddled in silence, the soft splashing of their oars drowned out by the eternal sigh of the river. Alice glanced at the war leader they called Magua and, remembering what had happened that evening, felt a little smug in spite of herself. Magua's eyes were sharp, but hers were sharper. She had seen Uncas coming long before he had. She had caught sight of him while they picked their way across the cliffs, racing through the trees, always staying out of the light. His only chance was surprise. She had known that, and so she had kept silent and waited. It had taken Magua a long time to see what she had, but not long enough.

When Magua finally noticed Uncas, he didn't look worried or even surprised, merely annoyed. He coolly raised his hand and four of his men disappeared to take care of the nuisance. He hadn't done it out of cowardice. He just wasn't interested. The young Mahican wasn't worth his time.

Alice wondered dimly where he was now. He had still been standing the last time she had seen him. One of the four Hurons lay on the ground, but Uncas was clutching his side, and the other three were forming a tight circle around him. If she had enough energy, she supposed she would feel anger because his recklessness seemed so pointless. It made no difference what anyone did. All of this had happened before, and all of it would happen again. It would keep happening until there was no one left to come after her, and then she would die.

Magua stood abruptly and raised his arm. The three canoes glided to halt. A pair of rough hands grabbed her and forced her out of the narrow boat. She staggered onto the shore and tried to take in her surroundings. The dark trees loomed over her, their branches and roots reaching out like claws.

Magua seized her wrist and turned to face her. He hadn't looked at her once during the entire journey. But he did now, and in the darkness his eyes glowed with such a deep, fierce hatred that she recoiled, fear overcoming her numbness for the first time since they'd left the Huron village.

His face froze without warning. Then his mouth twisted into an absurd half-grin, his eyebrows shot up and his entire face seemed to deform like melting wax. Behind him, one of the warriors fell to the ground with a shriek, grasping an arrow in his stomach. Then the trees erupted with screams.

Magua yanked her in front of him and shoved her to the ground. Somewhere beneath the shrieking and the chaos, Alice reluctantly admired the way he remained calm throughout the ambush. Completely unfazed by the arrow protruding from his back, he gestured to his men and shouted orders without a hint of pain or panic.

No one paid any attention to her. In the back of her mind she knew she should run, but there was nowhere to go. Arrows were showering down from every direction. And she couldn't seem to make her body move. The familiar icy terror welled up in her chest and spread to her arms and legs, paralyzing her just as it had on the George Road and outside the fort.

One of the Hurons sprinted towards the spot where she knelt and fell a foot in front of her with an arrow sprouting from his shoulder. Within seconds the man who shot it crouched behind him and jerked the Huron's head upwards. He glanced up at her and, without hesitating, pulled out his knife and in one smooth stroke sliced off the Huron's scalp, eyes glittering wildly in the darkness.

The strange young man reached out his arm and pulled her to her feet. Raising the scalp of the dead Huron in his other hand, he shouted something completely unintelligible to her ears. He roughly pushed her forward and instantly Alice found herself surrounded by more unfamiliar faces.

She felt her knees buckle beneath her. She closed her eyes and wished she would faint. She didn't. Someone fastened a rope around her wrists, and she was forced to start walking again.

BY THE TIME THEY CAME to a halt, Alice had begun to question the status of her mortality. Everything seemed to repeat itself: the ambush, the trek through the wilderness, and finally the parade through a cluster of brown houses that might pass for a village. She wondered if she had only imagined Uncas pulling her back from the edge of the cave that night. Perhaps she really had let herself fall into the yawning abyss as she had thought about doing. Perhaps this was hell, and she was doomed to wander through the endless cycle for eternity. It wasn't impossible. Suicide was a sin, after all.

This village didn't look that different from the Huron village she had left that evening, apart from it being night, which meant fewer curious onlookers. A thin column of smoke emerged from a few of the round bark-covered houses, and the orange glow of firelight seeped through the edges of the wooden doors. The only other difference was her two companions. Instead of Cora and Duncan, Alice found herself walking beside two Frenchmen. Their clothes were torn, their hair disheveled and their faces smeared with dirt and blood. They didn't look like soldiers. But then, neither had Duncan by the time they had reached the end of their journey. And, she reflected, she probably looked just as unkempt as they did.

She couldn't ask them. She had learned French during her five years at the London boarding school her father had sent her to while he went on his military campaigns with Cora. But her teachers had an unfortunately British way of pronouncing things. They forgot to soften the _j_'s and drop the _n_'s and _s_'s, with the end result that Alice could read the language perfectly but could barely understand a word of it. It used to bother her. Now she shuffled it to the back of her mind as just one more ironic detail in the meaningless seventeen years of her life.

They paused beside a fire where ten or twelve men sat in a circle staring stoically into the flames. The bilingual chatter among captives and captors stopped immediately. Everyone seemed to be waiting. The moments stretched on like lengthening shadows, and still no one acknowledged their presence. Finally one of the men to the far left stood up, and Alice stifled a gasp.

He was impossibly tall. His shoulder-length gray hair pulled away from his leathery face in a beaded half-ponytail and two tight braids above his ears. The hard-edged face bore the sharp wrinkles of age, but he moved with surprising agility. In the firelight, his black eyes shone like two dark unfathomable pools. Alice could almost swear those black eyes met her own for an instant before he crossed the fire and his face was masked in shadow.

He addressed one of the warriors to her right in a language that was neither English nor French. She couldn't separate one word from another, but she knew instantly he was one of those rare figures who could command absolute obedience without ever raising his voice.

In response to whatever he had said, the warrior to her right jerked his head at the Frenchmen and muttered something that sounded derogatory. The older man nodded curtly, said something else and walked back towards the fire, gesturing for them to follow.

A brief shuffling ensued. Two warriors half-heartedly dragged her away from the fire. Everyone else followed the two Frenchmen and the man with cold eyes whom she could only assume was their leader. Alice felt herself fading into irrelevance. They deposited her without much concern into an empty hut. The door closed behind her with a swish, and she was alone.

The dirt floor was cold and hard and smelled of earth. A few pelts from animals she couldn't identify lay stretched out on the far side, but other than that the room was completely empty. Thick strips of bark covered the entire building from top to bottom except for a small hole in the middle of the ceiling, where a thin stream of moonlight shone through to the floor.

Alice heard the footsteps of her two escorts fade into the distance. More out of boredom than anything else, she crawled to the entrance and pushed the door aside.

By the light of the fire, she saw the gray-haired man standing over the two kneeling prisoners and noted with some surprise that he was speaking French. The flames threw the faces of his captives into sharp relief. The older one looked exhausted. His head hung limply over his chest. But whenever the leader asked a question, he responded. His younger companion was shaking uncontrollably.

The leader eyed them both with the same impassive expression. Finally after hearing the last response from the haggard Frenchman, he nodded to the two warriors standing behind them, calmly turned his back and walked away.

At that instant the younger Frenchman looked in her direction. His terrified eyes met hers and she was shocked to realize he did not look any older than she was. Then his head was jerked upward by the same wild-eyed man who had seized her by the river. She watched those terrified eyes glaze over as the young warrior nonchalantly slit his throat and sliced off his scalp.

Alice fought back a wave of nausea, suddenly grateful she hadn't eaten anything in the last two days. She quickly closed the door and turned away. Then she crawled to the far corner of the hut, pulled her knees into her chest and tried unsuccessfully to forget what she had just seen.

The moments dragged on. The door opened with another soft swish, and the dark figure of the gray-haired man stooped beneath the entrance.

"You are English," he observed. Alice instinctively shrank back. He stepped into the moonlight so she could see his face. His expression as he looked down at her was neither kind nor unkind, but cold, appraising.

"I am called Natenummen," he continued with curt nod. "I am the sachem of the Lenape-sometimes-called-Delaware in these parts." He raised his eyebrows as though he expected this to mean something to her, but when Alice failed to reply, he shrugged his shoulders and pulled a long object out of his robes.

"My warriors found this sword when they came across the Huron war party," the sachem said with mild interest. "Did it belong to your husband? Did the Hurons kill him?" He fixed her again with the same expectant gaze. She looked down. He sighed.

"You obviously weren't very well brought up," Natenummen said dryly, "but I thought even among your people not to offer your name when someone gives you theirs is considered exceptionally bad manners."

The shock of receiving a lecture on etiquette from a man who had just sent two kneeling men to their deaths jolted Alice out of her silence. "Why?" she asked. Her voice sounded hoarse after days of disuse. She tried again, noting that her second attempt did not sound much better. "Why is that important to you?"

She opted not to qualify it with, _when I know you're going to kill me_. But judging by his response and the dubious amusement in his eyes, he evidently discerned her thoughts anyway. It occurred to her that he might think her impertinent, but she could not see that she had anything to lose.

"We don't make a habit of murdering unarmed travelers," the sachem replied, the barest trace of a smile playing on his lips. Alice felt insulted. Either he did not know she had been watching or he thought she was truly stupid after all. Her incredulity must have shown in her face. Natenummen cocked his head to one side, apparently debating whether he needed to justify his judicial decisions to a traumatized seventeen-year-old girl.

"Those men were spies for the Ottawa," he said with a note of impatience. "They knew what would happen if they were caught. If I had let them live, it would have put the entire village at risk. I don't gamble with the lives of people I am supposed to protect."

He frowned. He clearly believed he had done more than his part explaining himself, and now it was her turn. The sachem looked down at her unsmiling and waited for her to break the silence.

Alice swallowed. "His name was Edmund Munro," she said finally. "Colonel Edmund Munro. He was my father."

"I see," Natenummen said. "And he is dead, then."

She nodded. She did not think she could say the words out loud, not yet. Hearing them spoken so directly was hard enough.

"How?" Again the question sounded more like a statement.

"He was stationed at Fort William Henry," she answered methodically. "He had to surrender to the French. After we left, there was an attack."

"Did any of your family survive?"

She thought of Duncan, whom she knew was dead, and Cora, whose fate she did not know. If her sister had escaped, she would probably be with Nathaniel Poe right now. Something tugged at the back of her mind, a memory of rain-drenched hair, anguished blue eyes, and a promise barely audible over the roar of a rushing waterfall.

"No," she replied.

Natenummen paused. "It is the custom of our people not to say the names of those who have died," he said, his voice slightly less harsh although still completely devoid of pity. "I will not ask you to speak of him again."

That did not comfort her very much, as she was not sure how much longer she would have the opportunity to speak of her father, or anyone else for that matter.

"You still have not told me your name, Miss Munro," he reminded her coldly.

"Alice," she replied in a hoarse whisper.

"Alice," he repeated. He let the last syllable linger on his tongue in a low hiss and paced the room thoughtfully.

"We are not allies of the Crown, Miss Munro," he said. "But we are not enemies either. My people do not approach the British forts because the British would interpret it as a gesture of allegiance." He fixed his black eyes on her again. "We are in the wilderness, surrounded by the French and the Huron and the Ottawa. Where will you go now?"

It may not have been a rhetorical question, but Alice did not offer any suggestions. The only choice she had made in her entire life was to come to this continent in the first place, and she could see what a mistake that had been. Natenummen continued pacing. He no longer seemed to be paying attention to her. He walked back to the small door, stooped down and left as silently as he had entered.

Alice heard voices outside again, but they weren't speaking any language she recognized. She didn't care for a closer look. She gazed up at the hole in the ceiling and watched the small patch of sky lighten from dark blue to the pale cerulean before sunrise.

Minutes or hours passed. The door abruptly reopened. In the glare of the sunlight, Alice recognized the long-haired, wild-eyed man she had already seen scalp two people and felt something like relief wash over her. So they had decided to kill her after all.

The young man stretched out his arm and jerked his head toward the door, shouting words she didn't understand. She gaped at him. Did he honestly expect her to just walk to her death?

He kept beckoning. Finally, looking exasperated, he strode across the room and yanked her to her feet for the second time, still chattering incomprehensibly. Alice stumbled as he dragged her outside into the harsh, uncertain light of dawn.


	3. The Road Not Taken

Uncas paused in his sprint to examine the ground, but it remained as frustratingly undisturbed as it had been two miles farther back. Every blade of grass stood upright, and the only footprints in the dirt were those of his brother half a mile ahead. To his right, the river rushed past with the same monotonous churning it had made for the last six hours. Behind him, Cora walked beside Chingachgook like a wraith. Her cheeks were sunken, and her eyes looked tired and vacant. Uncas suspected she had held herself together for most of their journey largely out of a desire to appear strong for her younger sister. With Alice gone, Cora was just a couple more unpleasant surprises away from going to pieces herself.

Uncas glanced up at Nathaniel's receding figure. His brother paused at the top of an elevated rock where the river turned southwest and looked back. Uncas was sure Nathaniel saw him crouched on the ground and probably thought his wounds were bothering him. Well, let him believe that, he thought. At any rate, his brother knew better than to say anything.

Uncas rubbed his eyes and tried to clear his head. He hadn't slept much last night – or any night since they had come across the wreck that used to be the Cameron farm. More than a week after the fact, he still couldn't blot the images from his mind: the burnt-out shell of a cabin, the shattered table where they had sat with Jack Winthrop just two nights earlier, and Alexandria Cameron's face, eyes unblinking like a discarded doll with a gaping red hole in her back. It didn't matter that he had seen it all before. Nineteen summers should have been long enough for him to accept that people on the frontier died with disturbing frequency. But even though he knew it in the back of his mind, he couldn't ever get used to it.

Nathaniel had seen his reaction and sympathized, but he couldn't really understand it. His brother, Cora Munro and the vociferous British officer-turned-martyr who had accompanied them all reacted to death and violence with the same defiant brashness. They hardened themselves to the horror so they could withstand it more easily. It wasn't a bad response. It just wasn't one Uncas could relate to.

Seeing the younger Munro sister completely unable to mask her pain had felt, in an oddly selfish way, reassuring. It wasn't anything in particular she said or did. Just knowing she was around, that someone else like him existed, had a soothing effect. Like a loneliness he hadn't even known was inside him had suddenly been filled. The world didn't feel so harsh when she was nearby. Now that she wasn't there, a thousand little things that had never bothered him in his life had become impossibly irritating.

Uncas glanced up at Nathaniel again. He hadn't moved from his spot near the bend in the river. He seemed to be staring at something in the distance. Uncas put his ear to the ground and finally heard what his brother saw. It sounded like heavy rain pounding against the bottom of the earth.

Horses. Only the English or French would be foolish enough to ride horses this deep in the wilderness, he thought.

Another short sprint to where Nathaniel stood revealed thirty red-coated figures cantering towards them through the trees. Uncas glanced at his brother and voiced what they were both thinking.

"They might know something," he said quietly.

Nathaniel groaned. "I was afraid you would say that."

Nathaniel turned around and waved to their father. Then he let out a series of rapid hand gestures they had both learned as children. Chingachgook's response was short and decisive. They waited.

"This is a bad idea," Nathaniel muttered under his breath.

"You thought tramping through the wilderness with three English aristocrats was a bad idea too," Uncas pointed out. "It's a little late to feel sorry now."

"I didn't say I was sorry," Nathaniel replied. "That doesn't make it any less of a bad idea."

Uncas returned his gaze to the scarlet riders now less than half a mile away. He couldn't blame his brother for worrying. The last time Nathaniel had been surrounded by British soldiers, he'd been wearing chains. His father and Cora clambered up the rock, both slightly out of breath.

"So now what?" Nathaniel asked. Chingachgook stepped down from the rock and raised his hand in greeting without acknowledging his white son's question. His father had never been one to betray much emotion, but the rigidness of his back made it clear they were not yet on speaking terms. In response, the scarlet tide of soldiers split into two branches that thundered past on either side, enclosing them in a tight circle.

In one swift motion, Nathaniel twisted Cora behind him, positioning her in the center of their small party. Uncas' fingers reached involuntarily for his tomahawk before he remembered his right arm was useless. Chingachgook didn't blink.

The ring of bayonets parted, and an irate soldier on a brown Narragansett strode into the circle brandishing a pistol.

"Who are you, and what's your purpose here?" the rider said harshly. Uncas squinted at the speaker – a light-haired, broad-shouldered man, probably an officer, although his uniform was coated in dirt and somewhat torn. Not a bad sort. Under different circumstances he might have liked the man, if he hadn't been glaring at them like he would have loved nothing more than an excuse to run them through.

"No purpose," Chingachgook replied calmly, keeping his hands forward where the officer could see them. "Just four travelers making our way through the wilderness."

"This is a war zone. There aren't any travelers here," the officer returned in a tone that was, if possible, harsher than before.

"And yet here we are," Chingachgook said evenly. "Where are you headed?"

The seemingly innocent question sent a ripple of shock though the ranks. One of the riders cocked his rifle and jabbed it forward so it was barely a finger's breadth from Chingachgook's forehead. Chingachgook fixed the soldier with a steely glare that would have melted a man twice his size. The man shifted in his saddle uncomfortably, looking like he wished he could withdraw his rifle without losing face.

"We're survivors of Fort William Henry," Cora broke in. It was the most she had spoken since Nathaniel had dragged her away from the Hurons the previous night.

"William Henry?" the officer repeated. "You're a bit far north for that."

"Sorry," Nathaniel said, sounding anything but. "The Hurons must have forgotten that when they hauled off their captives."

"You escaped the Hurons?" the officer said, raising his eyebrows. Uncas couldn't tell if he sounded skeptical or impressed.

"No," Uncas replied coolly. "Tracking."

The officer eyed them with a look that was undoubtedly skepticism. "A couple of settlers and a pair of Mohawk guides are taking on an entire Huron war party?"

"They're not-" Cora began, but Nathaniel cut her off with sharp look. _Don't_, he warned her wordlessly.

"They're not our guides," she finished rather lamely. "We're just going the same direction."

Uncas glanced at Cora, but she didn't seem inclined to say anything else.

"The Hurons took a member of our party with them," Chingachgook said with an icy politeness that barely concealed his satisfaction at having the moral, if not literal, high ground. "Have you seen any trace of them?"

The officer's face lost some its hostility. For a moment he looked almost sympathetic.

"We might have," he said tiredly. "We came across a few butchered corpses about two miles back. Couldn't be sure they were Huron, though."

Nathaniel snorted softly, as if he'd expected nothing less from the Englishman.

"And what are you doing this far north?" his brother asked. "I thought the French were moving in on Albany. Shouldn't you be looking out for your people there?"

Instantly the sympathy vanished and the mask of cold antagonism returned to the officer's face.

"General Webb sent us to hunt down the Ottawa," he said stiffly.

Nathaniel took in this information with incredulous contempt. "Webb can't spare reinforcements for Munro, but he can afford to send thirty men on a wild goose chase?"

"I don't question orders, I just follow them," the officer said with a note of exasperation. "Good luck finding your friend."

He nodded curtly to his men and they lifted their bayonets. The circle broke and the riders departed, sending up a cloud of dust as they passed. It didn't reach high enough to veil the officer's face though, which for a brief moment looked unspeakably fatigued.

"Damn this place to hell," Uncas heard him mutter as he spurred his horse into a gallop.

Uncas watched them shrink into the forest until their figures were no more than bright red dots. For a moment they reminded him of the fallen apples he and his brother used to watch float down the river when they were younger. Rotten, unpicked and unwanted, they were good for nothing but an afternoon's morbid amusement. They bobbed helplessly in the rapids until the current carried them over the cliffs and crushed them to limp and lifeless pulp.

Aside from his uniform, the nameless English officer had at least three things in common with the late Duncan Heyward: He was outwardly obnoxious, inherently decent and almost certainly dead.

Nathaniel brushed past him, throwing him a look that plainly said, _What are you going to do, chase every war party on the frontier?_

_No,_ Uncas thought to himself, _not that it would matter if I did._ It wouldn't change what had happened to the Camerons or what had happened last night. At least these soldiers knew what they were getting into. He wondered for a moment if it was better, being able to see or at least suspect death was coming instead of having it arrive like an ambush unexpectedly one quiet summer afternoon while the rest of the world dozed in blissful ignorance.

He twisted his side as he walked, deliberately trying to irritate the gash Cora had sewn up the night before, hoping for some small spasm of physical pain to distract him.

"Why did you want them to think you were Mohawks?" Cora asked to no one in particular. Now that she'd found her voice again, asking questions seemed to make her feel better.

"Because the English are frightened," Uncas replied. "They don't trust anyone except their own allies."

He looked down at the hoofmarks riddling the wet ground with a mixture of dismay and irritation. He almost hoped the English officer had been wrong about coming across the Huron remains. If the soldiers had found them, their horses had probably trampled any trail the Hurons would have left for them to follow.

They found five Huron bodies a couple miles downriver, roughly where the officer had said they would be. Uncas glanced over the corpses just long enough to ascertain that Magua was not among them. Then he scoured the surrounding area for anything that might hint as to where the other four had escaped, but as he had suspected, most of ground was marred beyond recognition.

Nathaniel lingered over the bodies, rolling them over one by one. "There isn't a single bullet wound on them," he said with surprise. "They were all killed with knives and arrows."

Uncas considered this. He ran through the list of all the tribes in the area that wouldn't have easy access to muskets. It wasn't very long.

"Lenape," Chingachgook said shortly.

"The Delaware?" Nathaniel echoed. "Thought they all left for Ohio with the rest of our folk."

"A few stayed behind," Chingachgook said. "They decided they would rather deal with British and the Iroquois than leave their homes."

Nathaniel abandoned the corpses and joined Uncas surveying the terrain. It shouldn't have been this difficult. Alice was an English girl wearing English shoes, and she had not been trained to walk lightly. Her footprints would have been obvious on any surface that hadn't just been flattened by thirty English horses.

"What do you think?" Cora asked. The fatigue in her voice could have almost been mistaken for indifference.

"Five options," Nathaniel answered. "One, the Delaware left on foot and took your sister with them. Two, the Delaware commandeered the canoes and took her with them – less likely, since four Hurons got away and would probably have needed the canoes for that."

"And that would be better? Being with the Delaware?" She sounded more hopeful than certain.

Nathaniel glanced at Uncas. "Probably," he said, with less confidence than Cora most likely wanted to hear. The Delaware were historically diplomats first and warriors second, but they didn't exactly have an amicable relationship with the British or their allies in the Iroquois Confederacy.

Cora seemed at least for the moment to accept the uncertainty in Nathaniel's voice. "And the other options?"

"The next two are the same as the first two, except with the Hurons," his brother replied.

"And the fifth?"

"That your sister escaped on her own," his brother said. Nathaniel looked downriver, and Uncas looked inland. There wasn't much hope of overtaking them if they had escaped on foot – whoever "they" were, assuming the plural pronoun was appropriate in this case. They wouldn't even know where to begin.

Something shiny glinted at the base of one of the trees. Uncas didn't know how he had missed it, but perhaps he just needed to look at it from a different angle. He approached the tree cautiously, feeling a small glimmer of hope for the first time since they had heard the English officer's news. He crouched down to examine the abandoned object.

A brass button, just like dozens of others dotting the red jackets of the British soldiers. That was all. It had probably fallen off as they were riding. He looked at it more closely. A few stray scarlet threads had clung to the back of the button where it broke off. Useless, Uncas thought, just like their commanding general and the suicide mission he'd sent them on.

Nathaniel shuffled his arms. "We could spread out," he suggested without much conviction. "Find a perimeter. See where the hoofmarks end and look for footprints."

"No."

Chingachgook's voice cut in on their conversation like the crack of an English rider's whip.

"We've already lost too much time," he said. He looked at Cora. "We should be chasing the Hurons. Their way is more dangerous for your sister, and their way is the river."

The severity on his face reminded them that although Nathaniel did most of the talking, Chingachgook had been and always would be the undisputed leader of their group. Without another word, Nathaniel returned to his place at the front of the party and resumed his sprint downriver. Uncas paused only a moment before following him. Running would feel better, he convinced himself. In reality they were no better off than when they had started, but by running they could lose themselves in the illusion that they were going somewhere.

CHINGACHGOOK WATCHED THE FIGURES OF his two sons shrink into the distance and felt old. The war made him feel old, and the events of the last week made him feel older. He didn't lack compassion, but he knew his decision to guide the three English travelers to the fort had nothing to do with either of the Munro sisters or their excessively vocal escort. It was the Huron, Magua, of all people, who had convinced him to go. Chingachgook was certain he had never seen the man before in his life. But there had been something terrifyingly familiar about him on the George Road. Like someone Chingachgook had left behind long ago, or someone he was destined to meet in the future.

He had convinced himself he was heading west for his son. Uncas shouldn't have to live like a rootless vagabond his entire life. As much as he clearly enjoyed it, it wasn't right. He deserved better – a family, a future, somewhere he could belong. Nathaniel would always be torn between two worlds. Chingachgook couldn't change that. But he could do something for his younger son.

Then the Huron had appeared like a demon from his past bringing back memories he thought he had put behind him. Unfinished business. Choices he couldn't take back. A reminder that what had happened to Uncas was his own fault.

"Did the rest of your family go to Ohio with the Delaware?" Cora asked softly. "Is that why you're alone?"

She had resumed her place beside him while his sons scouted the territory ahead. Chingachgook regarded the elder Munro daughter for a moment. There was no desire to pry in her voice, only honest curiosity.

"My people didn't go to Ohio," he said. "That's why they died."


	4. The Herbalist's Pupil

Alice slid off what little remained of her stockings and dangled her feet in the narrow stream, letting the cool water rush past her ankles.

Everything was so much taller here. The trees, the mountains, even the people. She felt dwarfed. It made her ache for the empty slopes of Scotland and their soothing desolation. When she was younger, she used to creep outside her family's house in Arlysle on nights when the full moon rose and watch the endless sea of green and gray stretch on for miles.

She tried to ignore the feeling that someone was watching her. Someone probably was. The same wide-eyed, bare-chested boy had been following her for the last two days. But whenever she tried greeting him, or even glanced in his direction, he scampered away. It had felt vaguely gratifying at first. He was the only person in the village who seemed to care where she went. But after the fifth or sixth time he insisted on maintaining a one-way interaction, it had dwindled to just annoying.

She sighed. It wasn't as if they could have had a real conversation. She hadn't heard any English since the gray-haired sachem had interrogated her two nights ago, and the idea of approaching him again terrified her. Still, any exchange would have broken the monotony.

The last two days had passed like a gray blur. The young man with wild eyes had dragged her into a hut with three other occupants: a woman old enough to be his mother, a girl perhaps a few years younger than Alice, and the silent boy with the unabashed stare. The girl had short, ragged hair that ended just below her chin – a style that probably had more to do with the burnt patch of skin blossoming on her lower right cheek and neck than any current Lenape fashion. But other than that, she was quite pretty.

Seeing her with her older brother made Alice feel a twinge of sympathy for the quiet boy. His older siblings were both inordinately chatty. They kept glancing at her whenever she was nearby. She had no idea what they were saying, but she strongly suspected they were both laughing at her. Finally the sensation of being a curiosity had become unbearable, so she had wandered to the woods where she could be alone with her thoughts.

She couldn't think about the future. Whenever she tried to look any farther than a day ahead, a heavy iron door slammed shut on her mind, making her head throb. So Alice Munro watched the midday sun dance on the water and thought about the past.

She had only herself to blame for her current predicament. Coming to the Americas had been entirely her choice. Her idea, even. And the bitter irony was she hadn't really wanted to in the first place. She had told her extended family in Portman Square that she wanted adventure, to see the wilderness and the wild people who inhabited it. The words tasted like lies in her mouth even as she spoke them. But Alice knew that for all their feigned shock and astonishment, that was exactly the story they expected to hear. So she had played their game, because the truth, that she just wanted to feel like her father and sister hadn't left her behind, was too embarrassing.

The reunion, when it finally came, had shattered all her expectations. The war had aged her father much more than two years should have. There were more lines in his face. He looked tired, careworn and…lonely, she realized. The sight of his weakness hadn't disillusioned her, though. In a strange way it made her feel closer to him. She remembered thinking this time, maybe this time, he needed her.

But her father had brushed her aside. He had been lying when he said he was all right. She could see that he wasn't, but she couldn't help him. She couldn't even help herself. Now he was gone, and all the lies she had told in Portman Square had come true. This world had given her everything she never wanted and taken away the only thing she did. It all convinced her that if there was a God on this continent, he had a very twisted sense of humor.

The snap of a twig breaking behind her broke her train of thought. Probably her silent stalker again. Alice couldn't help feeling a little irritated. If he insisted on spying on her, he might at least have the decency not to make it so obvious.

"You don't have to hide. I'm not going to-"

She stopped short. A man stood behind her with his arms folded across his chest. His hair frayed out from the center of his head in the same outlandish style as Chingachgook's, although he looked younger, perhaps in his early thirties. He regarded her outburst with an expression of amused curiosity.

"Oh," she finished ineloquently.

"Apologies," he said graciously. "Alice Munro?"

Alice did not know what surprised her more, the sound of someone speaking English or the sound of her name. She wondered if a simple "yes" would come across as rude and settled for nodding.

He nodded back. "Temakwe," he said politely. "Sorry to disturb you, but you're sitting on my work."

"Sorry?" she repeated.

"I'm a _nentpike_. An herbalist. And I happen to need that tree you're sitting against."

"Oh." She wished she could formulate a response that wasn't monosyllabic. She had thought by coming out here she wouldn't be in anyone's way, but apparently she had been wrong. The herbalist strode over to the tree, crouched down and inspected the roots.

"I suppose since you're here, you might as well make yourself useful," he said, pulling a flint knife from his pouch and holding it out to her. He cast another bemused glance at her surroundings. For a moment his eyes glistened with the same ironic humor as Natenummen's with none of their coldness.

"Unless, of course, you are too _busy_…"

THE MAN CALLED TEMAKWE LED her into a deep part of the forest where the dense cluster of trees blocked out most of the midday sun. Alice still couldn't figure out why he had needed the first tree. As far she could tell, all he had done was dig a small hole at the base and fill it with tobacco. Then he had sat down, smoked his pipe and muttered incoherently for five minutes. He told her it was to appease the tree's protecting spirits. She asked if he really believed that sort of thing worked. He replied that her people believed using leeches worked, as if that somehow answered the question.

"Are you looking for someone?" he asked, noticing her gaze kept drifting over her shoulder.

"The boy who keeps following me," she answered.

"Mmmm. Gokhos." He chuckled. "The youngest member of the bird family. No doubt trying to escape Teme and Hinutet for a few hours. He loves them both, but I think he feels a little out of place around them."

Alice stared at him blankly. Temakwe regarded her with a look of despair. "You haven't even learned their names, have you?"

Alice felt her face flush. She didn't know how she was supposed to have learned their names. She considered pointing out some of the obvious barriers, but she had a feeling he might think she was making excuses.

He shrugged, seeming to accept her ignorance for the moment. "Gokhos has never been very talkative, and I'm sure you've been in the wikwam long enough to notice Hinutet and her brother Teme tend to drown out the conversation of whatever space they occupy."

For a moment her thoughts drifted to Cora and Duncan. During their brief sojourn at Fort William Henry they had done nothing but argue. The blazing appearance of Nathaniel Poe had driven a wedge between them. Even Chingachgook's name had come up once or twice, but not Uncas. He seemed to exist in a world apart, always trailing behind or walking ahead, as though he wanted nothing but to blend into the trees that surrounded them.

Something hard and solid collided painfully with her thoughts. Her hand moved involuntarily to her forehead. She tried to mask the gesture by tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. Temakwe eyed her suspiciously. "Are you all right?" he asked.

"Yes, of course," she lied. She hesitated a moment before voicing her next thought.

"Gokhos isn't…afraid of Teme, is he?"

Temakwe glanced at her with surprise. "No," he said. "Why, are you afraid of Teme?"

Alice tried to think of a way to phrase her feelings delicately and failed.

"I think he's going to kill me," she admitted bluntly.

Temakwe considered this. "Yes, I suppose he would have that effect, wouldn't he?" he said thoughtfully. "You'll have to forgive him. He's completely unaware of it."

Alice couldn't help thinking that he ought to be more aware of it, seeing as he had scalped a man barely a handbreadth from her face. But Teme didn't strike her as a very thoughtful person.

"Here," Temakwe said abruptly. He stopped in front of a white oak tree. "Watch closely."

He took out his flint knife and tore three long strips of bark from the tree. "Take the bark from the east side. The light of the rising sun makes it stronger." He watched her curiously, as if waiting for her to question the superstition. She decided against it and knelt on the ground in tightlipped silence, smoothing her skirts delicately, if somewhat futilely, as she sat.

Temakwe was still staring at her. "Do you know which side is east?" he asked.

Alice bit her lip and shook her head. He bent down and pointed to the soft green growth at the roots.

"Moss grows on the north," he said. "You can figure out the rest yourself."

THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED BEGAN what Alice would for a long time consider the worst few weeks of her life. She couldn't recall another period when she found a new reason to question her right to exist at least once an hour. Looking back, she was convinced she survived for one reason and one reason only: Temakwe refused to let her fail.

The tattooed herbalist treated her with a confidence she found alternately inspiring and alternately infuriating. She quickly learned that he never gave unsolicited advice. If she didn't ask a question, he either assumed she knew the answer or was content to watch her mess up. But to be fair, he never regarded a question as stupid either. Sometimes it felt good, having someone who at least on the surface assumed she was competent. Other times she thought his patient, all-knowing smile looked positively sadistic.

For reasons she didn't really want to contemplate, Temakwe insisted on teaching her Lenape. A single afternoon made Alice conclude it was just like learning French, only about a hundred times more difficult. Not only did the language lack a clear subject-verb-object distinction, it seemed to lack consistent grammatical rules entirely. The Lenape could create a new word for every thought just by adding a string of prefixes and suffixes onto it. On some abstract metaphysical level, she supposed this made the language more interesting. At the moment it just frustrated her.

Daily existence in the wikwam evolved into a painful experiment in trial and error in which all her mistakes were put on display for her four hosts. Teme took his little brother Gokhos hunting most days, leaving Alice with the matron, a stern but gentle woman named Chiskukus, and her choppy-haired daughter Hinutet. The former regarded her attempts to fit in with sympathy, the latter with contempt.

Alice made her first mistake the morning she caught sight of Teme outside the wikwam slathering bear grease lotion through his long hair and over his body. She blushed when he noticed her staring at him, feeling like she had just walked in on something indecent. He glanced at her as if the action were completely normal and seemed surprised when she refused to take the bowl of lotion.

After a full day of weeding in Chiskukus' garden, Alice discovered that what she had mistaken for a Lenape fashion statement was actually a very effective mosquito repellant.

The next morning Teme unceremoniously grabbed her wrist as she left the wikwam. He inspected the pink bumps on her arm with a remarkably Cora-like expression on his face and proceeded to lecture her in Lenape. Then he reached for the bowl of bear grease and refused to let her exit until he saw her apply it.

Teme addressed her directly more often than anyone else in the wikwam. He didn't seem to care if she could understand him or not. However by that point Alice didn't require much persuading in any language, as she had decided the night before that feeling a little grimy was preferable to being eaten alive.

The days stretched on, and Alice felt her life gradually develop a routine. She spent the mornings and evenings pulling weeds with Chiskukus and Hinutet in their garden. In the heat of the afternoon, Chiskukus taught her how to weave baskets and Temakwe taught her how to tell wormwood from spicewood.

Alice both loved and hated their instruction. She craved it like a drug that seeped through her veins and clouded her mind so she didn't have to think about anything beyond day-to-day survival. But as days turned into weeks, she felt a strange and unwelcome sensation creeping into her numbness, a feeling of new life being forced into her from the outside. It grated against the inside of her body with the sharpness of a thousand needles or a crisp December wind.

She reasoned with the logic of any addict that she only needed a higher dose to dull the pain. So like the wealthy opium eaters in the darker districts of London, she demanded to learn more without really thinking about the end result. Education became her escape, and if she did improve, she did so unconsciously and against her will.


	5. The Quick and the Dead

Cora woke from her latest nightmare to find the side of her face plastered to the damp grass. Before she had time to blink, the dream images faded and the bleak reality of the New York forest rushed to take their place.

Nightmare. She wasn't sure if that word quite accurately described what she had just experienced. There was nothing particularly terrifying or unpleasant about the dream she had been having. She just wished it would stop.

She had been dreaming of Duncan again. Duncan as he was before their journey, back in London. They had been strolling by the Thames watching the pleasure boats drift by, laden with their delicate cargo of white china teacups and fan-bearing ladies in lace. She teased him for his staunch refusal to ever board one, but only mildly, as she knew his ego was soft and easily bruised.

"_You still have an aversion to the water?"_

"_Aversion? No…hatred. Loathing."_

He laughed with the easy smile that came so naturally to his face. A cold breeze stirred suddenly from the river, blowing one side of her shawl to the ground. She stooped to pick it up, but Duncan intercepted her.

"_Please. Allow me." _He retrieved the lost side of the shawl and offered her his arm. She accepted it cheerfully, with the affection a sister would show to an overconfident but much-loved brother.

Cora rubbed her forehead and tried to banish the conversation they had never had from her mind. It wasn't a future she had ever wanted. She had known that even before she met Nathaniel. She couldn't have been happy with Duncan. The confines of being his wife would have ruined the ease of their friendship. It wouldn't have been fair to him either, for her to accept his unswerving affection and be able to give so little in return.

Trying to make as little noise as possible, she sat up and used her fingers to comb the twigs and leaves out of her hair. None of the three men around her moved, but that didn't mean much. They were all light sleepers, and she suspected they weren't really sleeping at least half the time they appeared to be.

She glanced at Nathaniel. He slept sitting up against a tree with his arms crossed over his chest and his musket propped up within easy reach in case of a surprise attack. He always slept that way, every night for the last five weeks. Five wasted weeks, she couldn't help thinking. They had found the Huron trail again, but it had disappeared, and there had been no sign that Alice had been with them when they docked. Now they were reduced to guesswork.

She wasn't being fair, she told herself fiercely. It wasn't Nathaniel's fault. He had done all he could. But that, she realized, was exactly the problem. He _had_ done all he could, and it wasn't enough. She had been clinging to a naïve schoolgirl belief that Nathaniel could somehow make everything right. But as the weeks dragged on she was forced to accept that he couldn't, and it bothered her.

She couldn't tell him any of this. Not that he hadn't noticed. He had attempted to draw her out, but there was nothing she could say, so she had withdrawn into an act of fake smiles and feigned politeness that she knew hadn't fooled him for a second. He had taken the hint though, and gradually he had stopped trying. He wouldn't offer to comfort her tonight even if he did know she was awake. She had pushed him away, just like she had pushed Duncan away.

Cora lay back down, a little less careful to be quiet than before. Nathaniel didn't stir. She bit her lip and tried very hard not to start crying.

THE CLICK OF A MUSKET roused him from sleep. He hadn't really been asleep before, but the noises he heard were all normal, nothing out of place, nothing wrong. Or at least, he corrected, nothing wrong that he could do anything about.

He bolted upright. His own musket was in his hand before he was even aware of reaching for it. He scanned the forest looking for the source, and his eyes landed on Uncas kneeling behind a fallen tree ten feet away with his musket cocked into firing position. His brother's eyes were locked on something behind the trees that was lost on Nathaniel. He let his eyes drift towards Chingachgook, rigid as the cypress he was sitting against, and finally Cora, who had clearly already been awake.

Uncas glanced at him. Nathaniel followed the direction of his gaze, but he couldn't make out anything suspicious. He listened carefully. The sound of footsteps pressing softly against damp grass reached his ears. One person. Treading quietly, obviously experienced at it, but wearing heavy shoes.

The footsteps came closer. A tall, lanky shadow began to take shape behind the trees, moving very deliberately in their direction. Out of the corner of his eye, Nathaniel saw his brother stiffen slightly, almost imperceptibly. Then the shadow spoke.

"Planning to shoot me with that, Uncas?"

Uncas lifted his rifle out of the way immediately. The darkness hid his facial expression, but the shock in his deep voice was clear enough.

"Jack _Winthrop?_"

"JUST WHAT THE _HELL_ ARE you boys still doing out here?" Nathaniel demanded. Jack had led them two miles into the forest, where they were joined by Ian and five other sometime soldiers in Colonel Munro's seditious colonial militia. "You should have gotten back to your homesteads weeks ago."

Ian shrugged. "We came. We saw. Looked around and decided it wasn't worth staying."

They had emerged into a small clearing, where Nathaniel could fully absorb the absurdity of the situation. It wasn't just the militiamen wandering through the wilderness. The clearing was populated with over a dozen women and children, most stretched on the ground asleep, some sitting up quietly on the grass. Nathaniel looked at Ian, silently asking why more than twenty people had just decided to walk off and abandon their farms. The older man looked at Jack, who seemed to reluctantly accept the duty of explaining their circumstances.

"Ottawa got there first," he said.

"How many?" Nathaniel asked tersely, certain he didn't want to know the answer.

"Four," Jack replied. "Stowes, Johnsons, Sewards and McCormicks." He ran his fingers through his auburn hair. "Seward got lucky, if you can call it that. His oldest boy was gone hunting when the Ottawa came. He got back to find his mother and two little brothers all dead, and him with the only rifle in the house."

Nathaniel glanced at the oldest and now only Seward child, whittling at a wooden figurine with a carving knife. The boy wasn't more than twelve. He didn't want to imagine what that had felt like. He shifted his musket over his shoulder uncomfortably as Uncas walked off to sit with the Sewards. His brother had always been better at dealing with grief, partly because he wasn't ashamed to show it himself.

Jack clapped him on the back and led him towards a small fire – a sign of either great courage or great stupidity, Nathaniel thought. But his family had been wandering the area for two weeks without seeing a trace of another living soul, so the settlers probably weren't in any immediate danger. By the light of the flames, Nathaniel saw his friend's face clearly for the first time that night. His normally merry eyes were lined with dark circles, and his forehead had a few new lines that definitely had not been there at their last meeting. For a moment Jack looked almost as old as the clothes on his back.

"You look like hell," Nathaniel told him. Jack smiled grimly and returned the compliment.

"Did Munro ever find out about you helping us desert?" Jack asked him.

"Tried to hang me for it," Nathaniel replied, grateful for the change in topic.

Ian laughed and slapped him on the shoulder. "Well, if he tries again, we'll give him a fight that would make that dog Montcalm look like a French poodle."

"He won't," Nathaniel said. "He died right after the fort fell. A party of Hurons ambushed us on the way out."

"Oh." Ian looked down. Nathaniel knew the older man bore no affection for Munro, but it was awkward nonetheless.

"What do you plan to do with all these people now?" Nathaniel asked, trying to break the uncomfortable silence.

"Headin' west to Cantuckee," Ian said. "Figure the war won't follow us there."

"About half decided to stay behind and take their chances," Jack said wearily. Nathaniel could sense the weight of responsibility hanging on his shoulders. They had agreed to depart as soldiers at Jack's urging, and they had come back gravediggers.

Ian looked at him hopefully. "You'll come with us, won't you?"

"Can't." Nathaniel nodded towards Cora, who had migrated towards the makeshift infirmary and was helping boil rags to use in poultices. "We were tracking the Hurons. They took Cora's sister with them."

"Were?" Jack repeated.

"We lost their trail about two weeks back," he said with a grimace. Admitting it hurt more than he thought it would. He knew his frustration was at least partly egotistical. As far as he could tell, Alice Munro wasn't a bad kid, and she certainly hadn't asked for any of this. But that aside, he hated failing at something he set out to do.

Jack looked over at Cora and grinned. "So?" he asked.

Nathaniel shrugged. He knew Jack thought he was deflecting the conversation to a more pleasant topic, but it was having the opposite effect.

"So what?" he asked, attempting to sound nonchalant.

"Well…_so?_"

"So nothing," Nathaniel replied, hoping that response might discourage him. Rather predictably, it didn't.

"You mean you haven't even _talked_ about it?"

Nathaniel looked down awkwardly, trying to take an avid interest in the physical properties of switchgrass. The truth was he and Cora hadn't talked about much at all since their escape. He had understood her silence for the first few weeks of their journey. But lately she had begun talking in a short, tense, perfectly pleasant manner that concealed more than when she didn't say anything at all. The odd extremes of their relationship made his head spin. They could die for each other, but they couldn't have a coherent conversation.

He was saved from having to come up with another reply by Chingachgook.

"Did you meet any Huron or Ottawa on your journey, Jack?" his father asked from behind them.

"A few times," Jack replied. "We always send out a couple men to scout the territory ahead. Seems like they're just getting larger. A couple times we've heard reports of Huron and Ottawa merging."

"They're moving south like you," Chingachgook said. "Eventually you won't be able to keep eluding them. You should break west sooner, not later."

Ian nodded thoughtfully. Hoping to avoid more questions, Nathaniel took advantage of the momentary distraction to slip away. His absence didn't go entirely unnoticed, however, as he overheard Jack remark, "She really floors him, doesn't she?"

"That's good," he heard Ian reply. "It's about time someone did."

THE NEXT DAY JACK AND Ian convened, and they decided to keep heading south for at least another fortnight and turn west when they had passed the Catskills. Chingachgook's party opted to join them in the hope of finding more traces of the Huron or the Ottawa and because they didn't have any other leads. On the second day they journeyed unhindered through Mohawk land, and on the third day Cora lost her temper.

Word of her misfortune had spread throughout the camp, prompting several unwelcome but well-intentioned outpourings of sympathy. She bore most of them with same placid smile she had worn for the last two weeks, but an outright tactless remark from the elder Seward finally accomplished what Nathaniel could not:

"Well, I'd offer to join you, but I don't fancy being the one to have to put her out of her misery."

It took a moment for the meaning of his words to sink in. When they did, Cora felt her cheeks turn white with fury.

"How _dare_ you?" she hissed.

"Oh, come on," Seward retorted. "I know you folks aren't naïve. You have to have been thinking about it, I'm just saying it."

"You want to walk out of here right now," Uncas said in a low voice. He had not moved from his corner of the fire, but the glare emanating from his eyes would have prompted that response from any man with an ounce more intelligence.

"All I'm saying is there's a whole lot worse that could happen to your sister than a bullet in the head," Seward snapped.

"Get out!" Nathaniel snarled.

On the fourth day an eight-year-old girl disappeared, and Uncas found her drowned body tangled amid the tree roots in the river that evening. On the morning of the fifth day they held the first funeral.

As Ian read the closing prayer from a faded and weather-beaten book of Psalms, Cora wondered which was worse, to leave behind or be left behind. Nathaniel looked at Cora's unyielding posture and for moment thought it might have been better if she and Alice's places had been exchanged, and then he instantly felt guilty for thinking it. Uncas wondered how many more unseeing eyes he would have to stare into before he found the ones he couldn't forget. And Chingachgook looked at the faces of parents who had dug their children's graves and thought, _I have lived too long._


	6. A Series of Unpleasant Exchanges

"_Woatawes_."

Alice stared at the white-blossoming plant in Teme's hand and wondered if he was referring to the flower, the color or the entire organism.

"Woatawes," she repeated. Her response elicited no reaction from the three other people sitting on the grass, which she took to be a good sign. Chiskukus sat cross-legged behind her eldest son weaving a mattress out of soft rush, occasionally glancing up from her work. Gokhos and Hinutet were occupied with a game involving striped reeds which, at the moment, Gokhos appeared to be winning and his older sister appeared to be letting him win.

Teme ran his fingers through the grass. "_Maskik."_

"Maskik."

In a motion too fast to track, his right hand flashed out, snatched at the air and retracted. He slowly uncupped his fingers to reveal a firefly resting on his palm half-heartedly fluttering its wings.

"_Machque_." Without taking her eyes off her work, Chiskukus drew up the bundle of rush at her feet and swatted her eldest son on the back of the head. Teme winced, and the firefly seized the opportunity to disappear. "_Sasappis_," he amended.

Hinutet snorted. Gokhos looked up from his spot opposite his sister to throw her a sympathetic glance, which Alice tried very hard to take in the spirit in which it was meant. Gokhos rarely spoke to anyone even among his immediate family, so the fact that he reached out to her at all was an odd sort of compliment. But it was difficult to accept pity from a twelve-year-old.

"You shouldn't do that," Chiskukus said with disapproval. "….bad example."

Hinutet sniffed. "I thought the Yengeese…..bad enough manners."

Teme reached over and flicked his sister's burnt cheek. "You would know…. bad manners, little two-face."

Alice tried to ignore the disagreeable but increasingly familiar sensation of being talked _about_. The Lenape she understood generally came in jumbles of fragments and half-sentences. Sometimes Temakwe translated for her. But her self-designated tutor was doing it less and less, and he had threatened to stop speaking English to her entirely, a prospect she did not find at all appealing.

She fingered a few scarlet threads on her drab cotton shirt absentmindedly. It wasn't as if she wanted him to that badly. Picking up anything in Lenape required her undivided attention, and hearing English distracted her. But it was the principle of the thing, she thought with some indignation. Having a safety net she could refuse to use was vastly different from not having one at all. Temakwe ought to know that. Then she reflected that he probably did know it and that was exactly why he was removing it.

Perhaps she should pretend to be worse. Speak more slowly, falter more often, act as though she didn't understand him when he spoke. She wondered if it would work. Probably not. Genuine incompetence hadn't ever stopped him; she seriously doubted feigned incompetence would produce any different result. And everyone else in the camp seemed to share Hinutet's opinion of English manners. Alice knew it wasn't her fault, that they had formed their views long before she had arrived, probably from observing traders and low-ranked infantry men. She decided she would just have to learn more so she could start leaving a better impression.

The wind abruptly shifted direction, sending a shower of smoke, sparks and powdered ash into her face. Alice sneezed. Her eyes began to water, and she instinctively covered her face with her hand before realizing, too late, that it too was coated in the fine gray dust.

Teme rolled his eyes. "_Manitto, moskimutit_," he muttered. He reached out and plucked a small twig from her hair.

"_Tachan_," he resumed.

ALICE HAD SEEN VERY LITTLE of the man called Natenummen since her arrival. The tall, gray-haired sachem spoke to few people, and it was clear he respected even fewer. So it came as a surprise to hear his voice in Temakwe's garden in the middle of the afternoon, when the rest of the village had retreated into shadier areas to escape the heat. She was even more surprised to hear her mentor, in Lenape but otherwise completely lucid terms, telling him off.

"….we should have…when the war began, Natenummen."

"There is always another war here. We don't...just because…start bickering again."

"It's not bickering when…chosen sides. The Iroquois won't...We are…We don't have those kinds of _weapons_."

"What would you have me do?" Natenummen asked in a quiet and deadly voice that sounded distinctly out of place in the sunlit garden. Temakwe ignored the obviously rhetorical bent of the question.

"What we should have done months ago…. Ohio," he retorted.

Natenummen let out a soft snort of contempt. "It would be no different. Here the Yengeese...there we..._les francais_."

"_Les francais_ already...if...waiting to die."

From the back of the wikwam, Alice let her eyes flicker from one man to the other, from the younger herbalist with his half-shaven head and tattooed wrists to the older sachem with his braided uncut hair and unfathomable black eyes. Temakwe's voice had grown progressively louder and angrier as the argument continued. Natenummen's, on the other hand, had only gotten softer and colder.

"Fine," the sachem said indifferently. "Ask your student."

Alice stiffened. She had the distinct impression Temakwe had no idea she had been lingering in the shadow of his house and Natenummen had known the entire time. Natenummen turned away from Temakwe and walked out of the garden, passing the herbalist's house without looking at her. Temakwe remained planted among the uneven rows of sage and squash, digging his foot into the soil and frowning. For a moment he reminded Alice inexplicably of her father.

"Are you all right?" she ventured.

"No," he said shortly. "Natenummen is a proud, stubborn idiot who is going to get all of us killed."

He sounded even angrier in English than in Lenape. She bit her lip and wondered if she should press him for more details. Part of her wanted to hear the truth, and part of her didn't think she deserved to hear it when she had told so many lies herself.

"What's going to happen here?" she asked when she had made up her mind.

Temakwe didn't answer right away, which made her think he was questioning her capacity to deal with the truth as well. She wondered if he would tell her what they had been arguing about, or if he would tell her he didn't know, or if he would lie like her father and tell her everything would be all right. When he finally did answer, she had imagined every possible response except the one he actually gave.

"Why didn't the Hurons kill you?" he asked abruptly. His question caught her so off guard she responded on reflex.

"I don't know," she answered honestly.

"Really?"

"Yes, really," she said, feeling a bit defensive. She didn't like the way he was staring at her, as though he thought the Hurons had made a mistake.

"You don't find it at all strange?" Temakwe countered. "A war party bent on speed and destruction willing to let a fragile little English girl slow them down?"

The contempt in his voice stung. A small, rational part of her mind told her he didn't mean it and that he had been angry before she entered the conversation. But it was hard to think that way when a larger, equally rational-sounding part told her of course he thought her an invalid schoolgirl; there was no reason he shouldn't when everyone else did.

"I don't know," she replied coolly, trying to preserve some shred of dignity. "Perhaps they were dragging me to the nearest village. I wasn't really thinking about it." For a moment he looked exasperated, as though she was supposed to know something she didn't. Then he seemed to reconsider and decide perhaps she wasn't supposed to know it after all.

"You weren't in Huron country when Teme found you," Temakwe said with forced patience. "They were moving south. Away from the settlements."

He looked down, as if he regretted his momentary of loss of temper and was determined to regain control of it. When he looked at her again, the anger in his eyes was gone and he looked only tired. "Will you tell me what happened that night?" he asked.

TEMAKWE DID NOT INTERRUPT HER. That was about the only good thing Alice could say about the retelling. He let her talk herself hoarse as she relived everything from the massacre outside Fort William Henry to Duncan's barely audible translations at the Huron camp and Nathaniel Poe's backfired negotiations. She left out some details. Their brief hideout beneath the falls didn't seem important, and she didn't tell him anything about Uncas. It did not seem relevant.

"Do you know why he didn't kill me?" she asked.

"I have a guess, _moskimutit_," he replied. "Only a guess. From what you told me, it sounds like the Huron sachem is a man Magua respects. Someone he would be afraid to disobey. I think he planned to kill you the entire time, but he was too afraid to do it in Huron country where it would be obvious it was him. So he waited until they were far enough away to dock and then presumably slit your throat and let the river take your body."

Alice processed this information with the same numbness she had become accustomed to feeling over the last several weeks. She saw the unspoken question in the herbalist's face, asking why a man with hair like his but cold and empty eyes would go out of his way to ensure her death. She ignored it. She didn't know the answer, and she didn't think she wanted to.

"Why does this matter?" she asked.

"Because we live in the middle of war zone," Temakwe replied with dark frankness. "We need to know what the Huron and the Ottawa are thinking." He paused for a moment and eyed her carefully. She knew he was debating whether or not to continue, whether or not she could deal with whatever he said next. Or perhaps he wondered if he dared voice something that in another world would have bordered on sedition. The thinly veiled anger returning to his voice when he spoke again suggested it was the latter.

"And if we're going to survive, everyone except Natenummen knows our best chance is to go to Ohio."

ALICE DIDN'T STAY IN TEMAKWE'S garden very long after their conversation, and he didn't ask her to. No one in the village questioned her comings and goings. She was starting to enjoy the independence. The sun was still high, making her shirt cling to the back of her neck where a few beads of sweat were starting to spill down. She could have chosen a cooler place, but she knew Chiskukus and Hinutet wouldn't return to their garden for hours, which guaranteed her some solitude. She reflected with dull amusement that no one would even call her in for dinner, because meals were not communal affairs. She sat down on the sun-baked soil, tucking her ankles beneath her brown skirt and twisting a cup of hot water and ginseng root in her hands.

Tea with the Lenape. It sounded so domestic, like something prearranged and predictable. Oddly enough, the possibility that Teme had saved her life that night made no difference to her. What did that make him, except next in a long line of protectors standing between her and the inevitable? She didn't want any more saviors. They all failed eventually, and she was tired of having people die for her. And it wasn't as if Teme had meant to save her at all. He was just at the wrong place at the wrong time, like Uncas and Duncan and her father. She breathed in the aroma of bitter herbs and remembered drinking tea in a different garden on a different afternoon.

Ohio. The word meant nothing to her. A formless, empty idea, just as clouded as the rest of her future. She tried for experiment's sake to imagine the possibility of leaving for yet another foreign country. Before she had even completed the thought, it collided with the same iron door that kept her from looking more than a few days ahead. She gripped her tea more tightly in frustration. She didn't deserve Temakwe's good opinion. She clearly couldn't deal with the truth; she didn't even know why she had bothered asking. She supposed it must indicate some innate masochism on her part.

She was so focused on the diced particles floating in her tea that the sudden jerk of a warm copper hand over her eyes caught her completely off guard. Fear turned into irritation turned into embarrassment as her mind processed the image of Teme's laughing face peering down at her.

"…too easy, _moskimutit_," he said, ruffling her hair.

"Don't…do that," she said crossly when she regained her composure and her vocabulary. "It's…not-good-manners." She folded her arms and forced her face into a scowl, which Teme accepted with a mocking look of remorse. He sat down next to her and draped his hands over his knees. Something about the way his pouch sagged from his waist made her think there was something heavier inside than herbs and catgut.

Her eyes drifted over to his other hand, the one that hadn't covered her eyes a moment ago. It glistened with a reddish copper tinge that suddenly convinced her she didn't want to know what was inside. He noticed the direction of her gaze. His face, while never entirely serious, lost a small fraction of its usual levity.

"Ottawa," he said casually. "_Nischasch_." He held up seven fingers in case she didn't get the figure. Her eyes remained fixed on two bloodstained ones. Teme looked at her blankly.

"Something wrong, little rabbit?" he asked.

Alice shook her head. Teme shrugged, and for the rest of the day Alice felt an ache she couldn't name rising in her chest. A yearning for something lost, almost like homesickness. But when she ran through all the people and places she traditionally associated with home, none of them fit, and that troubled her even more. Not until nightfall, as she lay in the wikwam feeling the hard earthen floor press into her back did she settle on an answer, and even that felt inadequate: a sort of lonely despair, knowing that no matter how much she learned the two of them would never understand each other.


	7. Parting of Ways

The air was stifling, for all that summer had passed and given way to the colorful throes of autumn. Or perhaps it was just the company he found oppressive. Behind him, he could still hear the faint echoes of Nathaniel and Jack's casual banter with the other settlers as they trekked up the mountains. Occasionally even Chingachgook and Cora joined in. Laughing in the dark, that was what they were doing. It sounded forced and hollow, and Uncas couldn't bring himself to laugh with them. But he knew it was all that was holding them together, so he wandered ahead alone so he wouldn't taint them with his own darkness.

He took advantage of his position to scan the ground and the trees, looking for anything out of place. He saw nothing and marveled that after three weeks of seeing nothing it still had the power to frustrate him. At some point all four of them had acknowledged that they had stopped looking for Alice and were now just looking for information. No one ever talked about _why_ they continued the search. They operated on an unspoken logic: Nathaniel was determined to make Cora part of the family, and Alice was her sister, which made her, at least for the moment, part of the family by association.

Cora, for her part, was doing a remarkably good job resisting Nathaniel's efforts to drag her into their group. Of course this was only around Nathaniel. She was perfectly congenial to everyone else. Uncas was rather inclined to like her, if only because it felt incredibly satisfying to see someone knock his brother down a few notches.

Uncas returned his gaze to the trees and tried to shut out the falsely light voices behind him. Coming across the settlers in the wilderness had felt like rubbing salt in a fresh wound. It brought back an onslaught of memories of the Cameron farm, and the hard, steely looks on the faces of the survivors only made it worse. Listening to their strained laughter and seeing the callousness they had been forced to acquire made him wish irrationally for the reassuring humanity of two horrified green eyes unable to see the gruesome spectacle for anything other than what it was. He supposed that was the price of meeting the one person in the world who might understand him. It made being around everyone else feel like walking through a crowd of strangers.

He had never told her any of this during their short-lived acquaintance. Up until the night after they left the fort, he had made a deliberate effort not to get close to the younger Munro sister, for reasons that had seemed to make perfect sense at the time. Aside from the obvious ones, he didn't want to burden her with his conflicted and inherently selfish emotions when she clearly had enough problems of her own. He adjusted his musket over his shoulder impatiently. It probably wouldn't have gone anywhere, he thought. But the madness of not knowing what could have happened had he reached out to her sooner made him feel even more aggravated.

_Could have. Should have. Would have._ They all amounted to the same thing.

"Didn't your brother say this way was easier?" Ian asked panting. Uncas glanced behind him at the older man stumbling up the hill and clutching his side.

"No," Uncas replied, resigning himself to conversation. "He just said it was better." Which could have meant anything from fewer potential hiding places for a Huron or Ottawa ambush to fewer leaves on the ground, he thought as he offered Ian an arm up. _Because Nathaniel thinks he's God._

AT THE MOMENT NATHANIEL THOUGHT there was a vast difference between better and good. He didn't like the terrain. There were too many nooks and outcrops where a potential enemy could take cover. He didn't like travelling with a large company uphill – although that was preferable to walking through the valley, where they would be exposed and any attack would turn into a deathtrap. More than anything else, he didn't like the behavior of the two people in front of him. Jack was conversing casually with Cora, and even though they were not saying anything of consequence, his tone, posture and overall attitude looked suspiciously like flirting.

He took a moment to study Cora's face. She didn't seem to be responding to Jack with anything more than polite enjoyment. But she was starting to relax. The dark circles and vacant exhaustion in her eyes were gradually giving way to faint sparkles of delight. She smiled more easily. Laughed, even. Nathaniel lingered behind the trees, torn between the light music of her voice and a gnawing feeling of jealousy that Jack could make her laugh and he couldn't. In all fairness, he knew his resentment wasn't directed at Jack personally. Lately it seemed everyone in the camp could make Cora Munro smile except him.

With a conscious effort, he turned away from the painfully pleasant scene and returned his focus to the maze of trees towering over them. He didn't see anything hiding amid the looming black pillars, but he knew better than to assume that meant there was nothing there. As he scanned the trees, he willed his mind into the blank emptiness that looked for nothing in particular and thus remained open to anything and everything. He remained in that enlightened state for about a minute before the presence of a definite something broke his focus.

He left the path to inspect the something that had caught his attention. Chingachgook appeared next to him an instant later without ever seeming to have closed the distance.

"_Francais_," his father said quietly, tracing the outline of the footprints. Nathaniel nodded grimly. Scores of them, and not from the distant past, if the sharp imprints and lack of newly fallen leaves were any indication.

"Perhaps they were headed for the fort," Ian suggested from behind him. Nathaniel looked at him nonplussed.

"What fort?" He didn't distrust Ian, but there hadn't been a fort the last time he had passed through the area, and it hadn't been that long ago.

"The one with a French flag and four dozen bluecoats marching on top shouting "_Key-vah-la_" every five minutes," Ian said dourly. "The one your brother and I saw about two miles over the next ridge." His brief message finished, the older man took the opportunity to massage his back and catch his breath. Climbing up the hill had been difficult enough for him; he clearly resented having to climb back down to deliver his speech.

"Don't suppose the woods would give us any cover," Nathaniel said, glancing at the canopy.

"We'd be cutting it close," Ian replied. "They've got sentries guarding the perimeter of the forest."

"I don't fancy trying to explain our situation in a French barracks," Jack said quietly. His sudden appearance with Cora reminded them that their conversation was no longer private, and if they didn't lower their voices they might cause a minor panic.

"We could always tell them the truth," Ian suggested.

"What, that we deserted?"

Ian shrugged. "It could work."

"It could," Jack admitted. "Or they might just think we're spies."

Nathaniel thought that would be a stretch even for the French. They would have to have an incredibly low opinion of British espionage to believe that spies would tramp through the wilderness with an ungainly crowd of slipshod women and children. But he wasn't in a hurry to find out.

"So we turn back," he said as casually as he could manage. "Stay on this side of the mountains and take the long way around."

He glanced at Chingachgook for affirmation. Chingachgook didn't reply, but he was still frowning. He nodded to something behind Nathaniel, who glanced over his shoulder to find his brother cantering down the hill in their direction. Nathaniel recognized the look in his brother's eyes when he got closer. It was the same look he had worn right after the Hurons discovered their hiding place underneath the falls.

"Ottawa?" his father asked bluntly. Uncas nodded.

"How far?"

"Less than a league. They'll be here by nightfall."

Nathaniel swore under his breath. "How many are there?"

"Too many for a fight," Uncas answered. That ruled out two alternatives, Nathaniel thought darkly. Fight and flight both no longer viable options, he turned his mind to the third, the one he had always hated most.

"Where are we going to hide twenty people?"

"We can't," Uncas replied simply. "Not all in one place."

Nathaniel glanced over the mountainside terrain, searching for some way to turn it to their advantage. He let his eyes linger on a few outcrops and crevices that might conceal two or three people, if they were extremely still and extremely lucky, and if a wandering enemy managed by some miracle not to look directly at them. He could feel Cora's eyes on him, and it took all of his willpower not to turn and look at her expression.

"Let's start rounding people up," he said grimly. "Looks like we've got some bad news to share."

THEY DIVIDED UP BY FAMILY as much as possible, with one musket to every group. Uncas and Chingachgook did their best to conceal the tracks the settlers had left, both knowing they would need to rely more on the absence of moonlight than any of their own skills to hide them from prying eyes.

"Is there a reason your father is guarding Cora Munro instead of you?" Jack asked as he experimentally slid his weapon over a rock ledge.

"It's complicated," Nathaniel told him. Jack did not look satisfied with that answer, so Nathaniel fished around for another way to explain the situation.

"I think she hates me."

"That's stupid of you," Uncas remarked.

"Well, how else do you explain how she's acting?"

"Depends," Uncas replied without glancing up from his musket. "Would you like the short answer or the long one?"

Nathaniel grimaced. "Looks like I've got time."

"Fine," Uncas said. "You might want to sit down."

Nathaniel looked at him with suspicion, reluctant to relinquish his seniority so easily. "After you." Uncas shrugged and obliged him. Nathaniel followed suit on a rock across from him, still looking somewhat skeptical.

"First," Uncas began, "she's still getting used to the fact that her father and one of her closest friends are both dead. And then she's probably feeling guilty because the last time she spoke with either of them they were fighting. She thinks she loves you, and she didn't want you to die for her at the Huron camp, but she didn't want Heyward to die for her either, and she feels like she's betraying his memory if she lets herself be happy with you. She wants to find her sister, but she's not sure what will happen when she does, or if she can take care of Alice and stay on the frontier with you. So now Cora feels like she's choosing you over Alice, and that makes her feel even more guilty."

Nathaniel dug his feet in the ground, feeling significantly worse for the enlightenment. In hindsight none of what his brother had said came as a huge surprise, but it didn't help. He had no idea how he was supposed to compete with two ghosts and an absent memory. Jack interpreted his silence differently.

"I've got a feeling you lost him at _'she _thinks _she loves you,_" the former militiaman told Uncas.

Nathaniel eyed his brother with a look that might have bordered on jealousy. "Has she been talking to you about this?"

"No," Uncas replied patiently. "I just happen to think like a human being every once in a while."

NIGHT CAME MUCH MORE SLOWLY than Cora would have liked. She had never enjoyed battle, and she certainly had not insisted on accompanying her father on his endless military campaigns for the dubious excitement of it. But she had put up with the ear-splitting shrieks of cannons, the dull groans of the dying and the agonized screams of amputees because the alternative – months of waiting for news that would arrive even more months after the fact – was insufferable. And now she was trapped waiting again, and the one person she thought would understand how she felt didn't seem to want anything to do with her.

She couldn't see Nathaniel at all from where she was sitting. The rock face jabbed painfully into her back in the tiny crevice where she crouched with Chingachgook. Uncas knelt behind an outcrop not far to her right with the two older McCormick siblings. He sat with the same alert tension as his father and brother, but his face lacked the brief flickers of impatience that so often crossed Nathaniel's. Chingachgook's face was almost a mirror of his son's except for a cold, calculating edge that sharpened his features. Both Mahicans seemed to radiate an inner calm she was sure could not reflect their true emotions. Normally she appreciated the peaceful gravity that came so naturally to them. Right now it just made her want to scream.

Uncas had promised that the Ottawa would arrive by nightfall. Nightfall came and went. In a futile effort to keep track of time Cora began to count the stars as they appeared in the sky, but that only reminded her of another night she had waited for the Ottawa to pass with another person beside her, so she stopped. If Nathaniel hated her company that much, fine, she thought fiercely. He might have said so to begin with instead of leading her on with fairy stories about stars and dead people.

There was no moon she could track across the sky, so she had no idea how much time had passed before the first tiny orange dots appeared at the base of the mountain. Torches, she thought with a sinking despair. The flickering orbs meandered drunkenly up the mountainside like cheerful heralds of doom. One by one, bodies began to take shape beneath them. Dozens of dark silhouettes swarmed up the hill in a steady stream without rank, line or order. In the back of her mind she dimly distinguished the confident, soundless strides of the Ottawa from the louder, ungainly footsteps of Frenchmen. Cora watched them weave through the nooks and crevices, cutting the settlers off from each other until they were surrounded by an enemy oblivious to its advantage.

She knew she should not be looking at them with hope. There would be no reason for the Hurons to be here. She knew that, and when the shadow of a straight-backed man with wild hair and a scarred, sunken face paused at the opening of their hideout she knew he could not be the same man who had killed her family. She waited for him to go, only half because she was afraid he would discover them. But he didn't budge. Feeling her irritation rising, Cora studied him more closely from behind the narrow opening, determined to find some dissimilarity. The sharp nose, rigid jaw and high, jutting forehead could belong to any bloodthirsty savage who fought for the French.

Her self-satisfied logic ran out when she saw the jagged notch in the blade of his tomahawk. The small detail sent her mind reeling with memories of a bruised Duncan stumbling through Huron country and Alice shrieking as her brown mare dislodged her. Against her will, her heart began to beat faster as it tried to reconcile a wild hope with an anachronistic fear of being burned alive.

The straight-backed man turned to look at them. His eyes landed on the opening, then on her, and she saw his face clearly for the first time. His eyes widened in surprise. He opened his mouth, but before he could make a sound Chingachgook sprang from the shadows and slit his throat. The older man silently dragged the body into the cave, allowing Cora to look at him more closely.

It was not Magua. She felt stupid. No, not stupid exactly, but that was easier than trying to find a word for the mixture of disappointment, relief and embarrassment coursing through her veins. She glanced at Chingachgook and wondered if he would scalp the man right in front of her. But when he reached out, he instead picked up the now superfluous tomahawk. He fingered the chipped blade, looking from the man to the weapon and back again, and for a moment Cora thought she saw a disappointment in his eyes almost as great as her own.

"MAGUA WAS WITH THEM."

Nathaniel stopped cleaning his musket and glanced at his father. "Last night?"

"I don't know when," Chingachgook replied succinctly. He tossed the chipped tomahawk to Nathaniel, who shifted it in his hands carefully.

"What are the odds of that happening twice?" he muttered as he tossed it to Uncas.

"Where does that take us?" Cora asked. Uncas had a feeling she was asking his brother, but she was very careful to look at all of them except Nathaniel. He decided to give his brother a minute to answer before breaking the silence.

"Backwards," Uncas replied when the minute had passed. "Follow where the Ottawa went until we figure out where they parted ways with the Huron and hope they left a fresh trail."

"I wouldn't worry about it," Jack said cheerfully. "The French scouts who were walking with them ought to take care of that problem."

Nathaniel stared at his friend blankly. "You don't think you're coming with us, do you?"

Jack shrugged. "Why not? Can't see that I have anything better to do."

"I thought you had a group of seditious deserters to take care of," Uncas pointed out.

Jack looked down awkwardly. "There's nothing I can do that McCormick, Stowe or Ian can't do just as well," he said with a touch of resignation. "And I don't think I should be the one leading them to Cantuckee."

Nathaniel glanced at Uncas with a rare look of uncertainty. None of the settlers blamed Jack for leading them away from their homes to fight England's wars. But they could both tell Jack felt he had betrayed their trust, and he wouldn't put himself in that position again just to redeem himself. Uncas shrugged his shoulders in silent assent. His brother looked back at Jack and then returned to his musket.

"Fine. But you get to tell Ian."

Uncas turned his back on the conversation and let his gaze drift across the remains of the previous night's silent invasion. Half the settlers were stretched out asleep on the rocks, having gotten no rest the night before. The air felt inexplicably lighter. Whether it was because no one had died, they finally had a path worth following or some mixture of the two he didn't know. But as the first rays of dawn crept over the mountains, he felt for the first time in weeks, not completely happy, but completely alive.


	8. Metamorphoses

Alice was six years old the first time she lied to her father.

That had been before the wars, back in Arlysle, back when she thought him omnipotent. He took his hounds out hunting during the fall. They always hunted deer, never foxes, as most of the wealthy aristocracy believed hunting such vermin beneath them. But they were not above defending their territory, so when a wild fox encroached upon the borders of the Scottish manor, then-Major Munro had stopped the deer hunts, surrounded the house with fox traps and let his dogs prowl the perimeter.

Alice had never believed herself in real danger. The thought that she might come across the red-tailed vertebrate had occurred to her as she crept outside the kitchen door to watch the moon rise over the highlands. But she believed her father and his dogs would reach her long before the wild animal. She did not have any second thoughts until she had wandered almost a mile from the house and saw a pair of yellow eyes glowing from behind the trees.

She spent the night in one of those trees. The dogs remained silent and her father's window remained dark while the four-legged creature paced beneath her. No one thought to look for her until sunrise, when one of the servants walked into her room and found her missing. Then her father had brought out his dogs and shot the fox while she tried to figure out how to make her stiff limbs move enough to take her back down the tree.

"_What were you thinking, girl?"_ he demanded on the march back to the manor. _"Did you not hear me say it was dangerous outside?"_

"_No. No, I didn't,"_ she replied.

His eyes had flared with what at the time she thought was anger and only later realized was worry. He had believed her, and so she escaped punishment. Or perhaps he thought sitting in a tree an entire night with a hungry carnivore beneath her was punishment enough.

She had not thought back to that memory in years, and she did not know why she thought of it now. But on rare occasions, she saw the same expression in Teme's eyes when he thought his sister wasn't looking. Normally he laughed at her mercilessly for her burnt face and raggedly short hair because he knew he was the only person Hinutet allowed to do it. But his eyes followed her when she turned away, and sometimes a look of remorse crept into them that belied his carefree exuberance. Alice recognized the look. For the first time in her life she thought she could relate to it: the paralyzing sensation of wanting to protect someone and failing.

A cold wind disturbed the leaves, making them dance in small spirals around her feet. It smelled of apples and burnt wood and autumn in Scotland. Alice shuddered and tried to dispel the feeling that the world was out of joint, when grief consoled her more than joy. It disconcerted her. She was starting to think things were twisting inside of her, and she had no idea what would take their place.

THE WAXING GIBBOUS MOON SHOT its filtered beams down like arrows through the canopy where the Huron war captain sat unmoving. The air was cold, and the thin cloth over his shoulder left both his arms and half his chest exposed, but he did not shiver. He watched the moon straight-backed and silent, counting backwards as he had every night for the last two years. In the translucent mixture of light and shadow, the people around him looked like ghosts, or demons.

Before, he had counted back to only one memory. Now there were two, and neither one pleasant. The warm, salty flavor of the dead colonel's heart had faded and left him with nothing but the sour aftertaste of anticlimax. He felt his chest constrict in cold anger as he remembered the look in Munro's eyes before he died. Beneath the shock, and the fear, and the almost pitiable helplessness lurked a tiny but unmistakable glimmer of confusion. Seven hundred forty-six nights he had thought of nothing but meeting the English colonel again, and the man had not even recognized him.

It was an empty triumph preceded by empty words. The promise he had given the colonel in his last moments did little to make up for the injustice of their reunion.

_I did not want you to die first, Grey Hair. I wanted you to live long enough to know how it feels to be unable to protect the ones closest to you._

They had new protectors now whose motives he did not understand. When he had first seen the man the French called Le Longue Carabine, he had felt a grudging respect for the white man who accompanied the wandering Mahican and his son. But his performance at the Huron village last summer brought a swift end to that.

"_Magua's heart is twisted,"_ the white man had told the sachem. _"He would make himself into what twisted him." _Hearing that, Magua had felt nothing but contempt and an overwhelming desire to wipe the self-righteous smirk off the younger man's face.

_Tell me something I don't know, you arrogant Yengeese bastard_.

They had all looked at him with the same condescending pity – the sachem, the white man and his snake father. That a displaced leader of a displaced nation thought he had the right to look down on him was almost more than he could endure.

_You think you understand, you whose people spent the last century groveling like dogs to the Iroquois?_

The subtle fox, that was how he had introduced himself to the French general. It had been a lie. He had told many lies since the day he watched the grey-haired colonel spear his sons. He had lied to his Mohawk captors the night he let their blood flow into his veins. He had lied to the English general in Albany who could not remember his name. It was odd that he should have lied to his ally, though. He was not a fox. He could not be a fox, because foxes had souls.

She had known that. He had seen it in her almond-shaped face and charcoal-colored eyes, eyes that used to sparkle whenever he approached. He had made the sparks go out the day he let their children die. Now those eyes delighted another. He could not blame her for leaving him, or for the horror that had filled her eyes the last time she looked on him. He had always known he could not go home.

The sachem had ordered him to let Munro's fainthearted wisp of a daughter heal him. He did not want to be healed. There was nothing left in him but the inertia to kill, and if the principled sachem would not let him do it, he would find allies who would. The Mahican could go on indulging his complacent sense of superiority. There was a demon inside him as well.

A cool breeze stirred the grass, lifting up the fragrance of damp earth and fallen apples. Magua closed his eyes and remembered the scent of his wife's hair.

CHINGACHGOOK HAD FELT TERROR THREE times in his life.

The last time, he had watched his son rush towards his death in a fit of infatuation. Then at least he had some warning. The first time there was no warning, except the stench of ash and blood and burnt flesh.

It should not have happened. There was no imminent danger back then. No war, no threat of invasion, no explanation of any kind. It was a feeble excuse, but their relative security had lulled them into carelessness. It did not matter if all or most of the able-bodied men left to go hunting at the same time. It did not matter until the day they came back and found miles of dead, blackened rows of corn and pillars of smoke rising from collapsed houses of bark and hickory.

They buried the dead in the old fashion, painting their bodies with red ochre. Then they had sat in council for days. Chingachgook did not remember all the options they debated. Some wanted to track the Abenaki and slaughter them in turn. Some wanted to join their kin in Stockbridge. Some wanted to make the journey to Ohio. They did not have to reach a consensus. Every man was free to act as he saw fit. But the Abenaki tracking faction needed numbers. So the voices grew louder, and the words ran together, until Chingachgook stood and everyone was silent.

He could have told them it was his fault, and it would have been at least partly true. None of this would have happened if they had gone to Ohio. He could have offered words of solace, that the dead were with their fathers, or with the stars, or some other hollow platitude. But instead he turned his back on the debate and walked away. He could still hear their voices arguing as he and his son left the village behind them.

He did not feel terror that day. The terror did not come until months later, when he met a blue-eyed boy with dark hair and a fierce, defiant face. Chingachgook looked into those eyes and realized he did not need to know the boy's story, because it mirrored his own, only several years advanced. The flames of anger and grief had died down, but in their place lurked a steady, smoldering hatred. He felt afraid for the boy and more afraid for himself.

The second time Chingachgook felt terror was on the George Road, when he saw the same look in the eyes of a Huron war captain. At that moment he thought only, _Oh. So that is what would have happened had I stayed_.

He knew he had never really escaped. It would have happened all over again had the Huron killed his son that sweltering evening on the cliffs. This place would make demons of them all.


	9. Requiem

"Do you hear that?"

Uncas tilted his head but did not turn around. He did not have to follow Jack's gaze or even look at his face to know what he was talking about. The sound had become increasingly common in the last few days. Occasionally it sounded almost civil.

"I was nine," Nathaniel groaned at their backs. "I had no idea it was a Bible. I could barely read, and it looked flammable."

"In some parts of the world, that's called stealing, sir," Cora said primly.

"Well, they hadn't gotten around to the Ten Commandments yet."

"Uncivilized half-breed," Jack muttered. Uncas didn't disagree with the assessment. It was a family joke that Chingachgook had first found Nathaniel trying to steal gunpowder from the older man while he was asleep and had only adopted him because he didn't think anyone else could punish him properly.

They spoke less of Alice lately. It wasn't out of lack of concern; the topic just raised too many unanswerable questions. Cora had already found her own answers to some of them. He wondered if she was aware of it. She certainly wasn't ready to admit it. But regardless of what became of her sister, when the time came for decisions, Uncas knew she would stay. Nathaniel knew it too, and the guilt that accompanied that thought gnawed at both of them, so they found it easier not to talk about it at all.

Uncas realized he felt differently about her as well. He hadn't stopped thinking about her. But the way he thought about her had changed. At odd moments he caught himself picturing her with them, how her green eyes would light up when Nathaniel and Jack swapped stories around the fire, how a few strands of hair would fall across her face when she laughed. He wondered how it would feel to spend hours staring at the stars with her until the first streaks of sunrise painted the horizon and coated their faces with golden droplets of light. He wondered what she looked like when she smiled.

He dismissed those thoughts almost as soon as they appeared. She would never see it that way. If they did ever find her, she would only want to go back to Boston or England. A brief thank you and a polite, impersonal farewell would be the end of it. He could be nothing to her except a barely-remembered image from a dream, or a nightmare.

Jack slowed down to match pace with Cora and Nathaniel. Uncas willed his feet to move faster and tried not to think about why the idea of her forgetting him bothered him so much.

HE SMELLED DEATH BEFORE HE saw it. That alone told him it had happened recently. The cold air sharpened the scent of blood still untainted by rotting flesh. His first instinct was to turn away. They were strangers; he should not care. If he looked at them he would.

His second and decidedly more callous instinct told him that death meant information. A good tracker could draw a thousand messages from the shape of a wound, the crack of a skull, the posture of the dead where they had fallen. Even the dilapidated cabin in front of him with its half-collapsed roof and shattered doorframe was screaming stories for anyone who knew how to listen. So whether out of pragmatism or some innate masochism, Uncas walked inside.

Once he crossed the threshold the stench of the two corpses inside practically overpowered him. He tried to keep his mind focused on the useful messages contained within the walls. An even layer of dust on the floor meant the executioners had been gone for at least a day. The discarded tools and metal ware scattered on the ground meant they had been fast and efficient. He tried very hard not to think about how the boy's hair was the same shade as James Cameron's, or how the bullet that just missed his mother's heart meant it would have taken her hours to die.

Without knowing why, he let his eyes linger over her body. She could not have been more than thirty, but her brown hair had a few streaks of gray. Everything about her, from her rigid jaw to the white knuckles in her clenched fist, told him she had died in agony. On impulse he reached out and touched her hand, and a small groan stopped him.

"_Sind sie datz letzte?"_

Her words were barely audible and garbled with swallowed blood. She may as well have been speaking nonsense. It might have been nonsense considering the death-like delirium in her eyes that looked right past him. A glint of silver shone beneath the folds of her shirt. A necklace, perhaps a family heirloom, a relic brought overseas from the old world. Uncas didn't have to examine it closely to know it was worth more than John Cameron made in a year. He looked at the mud-stained lace on her petticoats, and it occurred to him that she had once been wealthy.

Suddenly her mere existence out here infuriated him. There were so many questions he wanted to ask her. He wanted to ask her the practical details any smart person would ask – who, when, how many. He wanted to ask her who her husband was, why he had abandoned her, and why she had left the safety of her prosperous European home to come live in this hellhole. Instead he looked at the blood trickling from the side of her mouth and did the most merciful thing he could think of, knowing it was more than he should do. He watched her eyes flicker shut as his knife cut across her throat and imagined he saw gratitude behind them. But perhaps that was only what he wanted to see.

Uncas left the cabin feeling dimly appreciative for the jarring return to reality. She would not understand him. She should not understand him.

The glare of the afternoon sunlight irritated him. The sun had no business here except as an obnoxious reminder that life would continue as normal and the rest of the world did not care that two more corpses were now fertilizing dandelions. Four pairs of approaching footsteps grew louder. Uncas walked away from the ruined house and prepared to tell his family the good news: The Hurons were less than two days ahead of them, and in order to reach the French outposts in the north they would have to rely on the cover of the mountains or pass straight through Lenape territory. Either way would slow them down.

_"Do you hear that?"_

He could hear it. A breaking noise, like the snap of a tree branch falling or the rip of severed rope. It sounded like letting go.

* * *

_In war waiting takes as much courage as fighting._

Her father had told her that the day they left Arlysle for a gray boarding school in London, the first of many she and her sister would pass through while he fought for the Crown on the continent. Alice had repeated those words to herself long after they left the dimly lit seminary on Gracechurch Street, long after Cora left her behind to join their father in Vienna and Alice lost count of all the distant relations and family friends who had little room in their houses or their hearts for a homesick Scottish girl.

She never asked her father why he had abandoned the family that loved him for one that would always look down on him for what he was, a Scotsman. She had only known that she did not want to be like him or her restless sister. She did not want to continue the Munro legacy of desertion.

_I'll come back soon. Be a good girl and wait._

She had betrayed them all when she left England. Her entire life she had kept her promise and waited. Then in a moment of impatience and isolation she had left her post to go somewhere she clearly did not belong. She had not even mourned them properly. But the worst betrayal was knowing in a barely acknowledged corner of her mind she regretted someone else more, someone who had either died or forgotten her.

_Alice, you don't blame him, do you?_

She wanted so badly to hate him. She hated him for the way he saw through her, a creature just as out of place in his world as the white cap falling from her hair. She hated him for saving her when she had no desire to be saved. She hated him because hating him was easier. Then she wouldn't have to hate herself for a moment at a ruined cabin half a lifetime ago, when the warrior and the hunter disappeared and she saw only a crestfallen boy. And she wouldn't have to hate herself for the moment he walked by her outside that cabin and she turned away.

She did not know what drew her to his fallen angel face or dark, lonely eyes. It wasn't that he made her feel any safer, or that he could somehow fix all the broken pieces of her. No one could do that. But for a few short hours he had held her in the darkness and the silence, and she had let herself indulge the selfish fantasy that someone else understood how it felt to fall apart.

_Smile for me, lass. Your smiles are what keep me alive on the battlefield._

She should have died that night. She should have died so many times before then. But the gods of this continent were more sadistic than that. Instead of dying, her punishment for leaving home was to do what she had sworn she would never do.

_I'll come back soon_.

The stars above the withered leaves looked old. Their eternal glow over the changing world seemed to whisper of long ages of dying and letting go. They glistened against the dark purple firmament like mirrors into her soul, piercingly clear and calm and sad.

_I love you._

_Goodbye._

* * *

_-End of Part I-_

*"_Sind sie datz letzte": German - "Are you the last?"_


	10. The End of the Chase

Alice Munro glanced up at the waning half-moon with a feeling of minor annoyance. She had seen five half-moons since she had come to the Lenape camp and at least as many full moons. It would not have been a bad way to keep track of time, if she had thought of it sooner. But during the first convoluted days after her arrival she had not paid much attention to the night sky, and so as a result she had no idea how many days or weeks had passed between then and her newfound sense of temporal awareness.

She supposed the twelve-month calendar didn't matter as much out here. In the wilderness time moved to the rhythm of falling leaves and frozen streams, not the beat of metal gears behind mechanical hands. But it was rather disorienting to think she had turned eighteen and not even realized it.

She returned her attention to the worn pages in front of her elbows, letting her ankles cross absentmindedly as she lay on the grass. Not a proper posture by any standards, but there was no one here she particularly cared to impress. And it was easier to make out the faded French words by firelight lying down.

"_Et lorsque, après des batailles gagnées, tout Londres brille d'illuminations, que le ciel est enflammé de fusées." _She whispered the words as softly as possible, reminding herself to ignore the closing _s_'s and not linger too long on the _n'_s. Conceding that she had an acceptable knowledge of Lenape, Temakwe had taken it upon himself to correct her French pronunciation. It gave the herbalist something else to criticize. She would probably thank him for it later.

Although she would never have said so out loud, it felt good to study a language slightly more refined than Lenape. The Delaware were polite enough, but she didn't think she could ever accept as fully civilized a language that had no word for _please_. However, that small propriety did not entirely atone for the crime of using too many letters. That alone she thought would justify blowing the French off the continent.

She did not feel afraid when the sound of gunshots split the silence, only a curious irritation that the attackers came with no warning. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Hinutet reach across the fire for her younger brother. A swarm of moving bodies began to emerge from the trees. Her last coherent thought was that at the moment, with his tomahawk brandished in his right hand and his black eyes blazing in anticipation of battle, Teme confirmed every preconceived notion she had ever had of the red-faced American savages. Then her feet stumbled backwards. Someone collided with her shoulder. Alice found herself lost in a sea of arms, legs and shrill, disembodied voices. Without knowing for certain which direction was right, she ran against the crowd and waited for the paralysis to start.

* * *

The sky was almost dark when they caught the first glimpse of smoke behind the trees. Without slowing down, Uncas took a moment to appreciate that for once the cosmos was aligned with the current state of human affairs. The few remaining autumn leaves trembled with the screams of the terrified, the terrifiers and the dying. He spared his brother a brief glance. Now that they had finally caught up to their prey, Nathaniel was probably glad they had left Cora and Jack behind, although he had not been nearly as happy about the arrangement when they had left the cabin two days earlier. His brother saw him and nodded back. No further interaction necessary, they returned to their old routine of fighting other people's battles. It seemed to be the only thing they did lately.

A flash of gold caught his eye, but when he turned to look more closely it had vanished. He shoved it to the back of his mind and moved on. To his right, he saw Nathaniel shoot a Huron two feet away from cracking the skull of a short-haired girl in a green shirt, who ran straight past without even looking at him. Uncas had just enough time to wonder how his brother felt at being so thoroughly brushed off before the swing of a tomahawk forced him to dodge left.

His slipped on a puddle of blood. Cursing his clumsiness, he threw out his hand and landed on his knees. He looked up at the source of his stumble and immediately wished he hadn't. Leaning against a tree, a French scout clutched his stomach in a futile attempt to keep his intestines in their proper place. His head lolled drunkenly to one side as he took in the latest arrival.

"You're not Lenape." The scout let out a strangled laugh as though he had said something funny. Uncas wondered why he was wasting what little breath he had left stating the obvious. He lifted his tomahawk and prepared to put the man out of his misery, madness or both.

"Don't." The English word sounded strange in the Frenchman's mouth, which was rapidly filling with blood. He held his hand above his chest in an apparently defensive gesture. The effort it took made his voice even more hoarse and strained. "Not your fight. And I didn't come here…for a stupid…revenge quest."

Uncas eyed the man skeptically and did not lower his weapon.

* * *

Alice willed herself to become invisible, but that was almost impossible when she was the only unarmed white person in a stream of brown and black. So failing that, she settled for hoping that everyone else around her was too preoccupied with their own predicaments to pay much attention to her.

She scanned the crowd for a familiar face and found several, but they looked as panicked and directionless as her own must be. She did not dare stop moving even to take a closer look. She knew what waited in the stillness and the silence, and she could not afford to go back there, not when she was surrounded by burning houses and incoherently screaming assailants. She tried to suppress the sense of inevitability that all of this had happened before, so of course it would happen again.

She caught sight of him on the edge of the throng, a part of the massacre but not. He moved with a purpose the other fighters lacked. His black eyes locked on hers, and Alice realized instantly that the last few months had not changed him at all. His eyes glistened with the same cold rage as when he had seized her wrist by the river. For a moment it did not seem improbable that they had never left that spot and the last summer and autumn had existed only as a dream in her deluded mind. The Huron cut down his opponent with the graceful ease of one used to commanding his body. Then he turned his deliberate strides in her direction.

Alice ran for the trees, knowing he could follow her wherever she went but reasoning at least there she would have to deal with only one enemy and not thirty. She couldn't help thinking it felt horribly unfair. He clearly hated her with every fiber of his being, and she didn't even know why. She wondered if he would tell her before he cut out her heart. Then she began to wonder if dying hurt much, and how long she would lay on the grass with her ribcage split open before her body decided it had lost enough blood and she would stop wondering anything.

She tripped over an uplifted root. She twisted around and saw him pass through the treeline, looking more like an unstoppable force of nature than a human being. He never ran. He did not have to. She was not even sure why she bothered scrambling to her feet with her back against a tree whose name someone important had taught her and she had forgotten. The Huron lifted his tomahawk – which she noticed had much more crimson than grey – and coolly hurled it in her direction without breaking the rhythm of his stride.

* * *

"I remember you," the scout said hoarsely. "Saw you…at William Henry. Didn't think you belonged there either. Did you never…wonder…why your lives got so complicated?"

_Not really,_ Uncas thought, but the delirious scout made the mistake his family would never have made and took his silence for assent.

* * *

Alice did not remember moving, but a moment later his tomahawk had buried itself in the tree and she wasn't there anymore. The Huron's face remained as contemptuously frigid as before. He was closing the gap between them much faster than she would have believed possible. He drew a long knife from beneath his robes, and she knew she ought to be thinking of her father or her sister, but all she could remember was the last time she had seen him raise his hand and send four men to kill someone whom logic and past experience told her she should have forgotten.

She backed away, knowing she could never go fast enough stumbling backwards on the palms of her hands but unwilling to take the time to get up. She felt more than saw his shadow fall over her. He looked down at her with a cold appraisal that bore an odd resemblance to one of her teachers in London eyeing an assignment completed too late. With something that could have been annoyance, he glanced up at the trees behind her and stopped.

He cocked his head. He looked genuinely surprised. Alice was sure if he looked back down he would find the same surprise mirrored in her eyes, but he did not. His knife slipped from his fingers as he took a few steps forward and landed on the grass to her left. The abrupt change in circumstances left her too dumbfounded to feel properly relieved. He was no longer interested in her.

Later, when she had time to question the who, the what, the where and the why, a thousand reasons would present themselves to explain the next few minutes, and she would reject all of them as false. She would remember the Huron standing motionless with his back to her. She would remember how her eyes travelled from his rigid back to his forgotten knife less than a handbreadth from her fingers. She would remember how it seemed logical to pick it up and equally logical to get her feet. And after that, it was almost a matter of course to step forward and slide it between his shoulder blades.

His arms flew up. A tremor rippled down his spine as he stumbled forward and turned to face his unlikely attacker. The frail, fair-skinned child looked even more terrified of him in death than she ever had during his life. His knees hit the ground first, followed by his shoulders and his head. His last coherent thought before his vision clouded was that someone, somewhere, was laughing.

Alice did not know how long she stood gazing down at the twitching mass of muscle and bone at her feet. She did not know less than thirty paces away stood an older, wiser and equally jaded Indian who could not decide if what he had witnessed was justice or not. She did not know how her knees were still supporting her, but it felt wrong that they should. The shrieking behind the trees sounded curiously distant as she sank to the ground, stared at a dead man and waited to sink into an oblivion that never came.

* * *

_French passage, full excerpt:_

_"And when, after a victory is gained, the whole city of London is illuminated; when the sky is in a blaze with fireworks, and a noise is heard in the air, of thanksgivings, of bells, of organs, and of the cannon, we groan in silence, and are deeply affected with sadness of spirit and brokenness of heart, for the sad havoc which is the occasion of those public rejoicings."  
- Voltaire, Letters on England_


	11. Aftershocks

Uncas scanned the carnage and thought at one time he would have found it shocking or horrifying, but instead it only disgusted him. He wandered through the crowd of the dead who were walking and the dead who were not, feeling like an intruder on their grief. They were intruders, his entire family. No one had asked them to get involved. Now their hands were as filthy as their righteously obsessed attackers.

His eyes rested on the figure closest to him, and he recognized the short-haired girl Nathaniel had narrowly saved from a scalping. Her eyes were locked on another man lying on the grass, either a husband or a brother. There was nothing he could do, so he turned his back on her. At least she could bury him properly.

He fingered a few specks of what used to be someone's entrails clinging to the edge of his tomahawk. Something felt missing, and he was not sure what. He searched his mind for the absent entity and with a dull sense of triumph realized he had not thought of Alice Munro once in the last two days. Good. He did not want to imagine the look on her face if she saw him like this.

THE SHRIEKS HAD FADED INTO low groans and prolonged wails that seemed to rise from the earth itself by the time she left the cover of the trees. Her vision had blurred, but she stumbled forward. The direction struck her as ironic. She had spent most of her time in the Americas walking away from massacres, believing that watching them happen was the worst part. Now she had to react to a new phase. She had been oblivious in the _before_ and useless in the _during_. No one had ever told her how to deal with the _after_.

Alice furiously rubbed the sleeve of her black shirt against her face. The smoke made her eyes water and gave the impression she was crying when she wasn't. She relished the sensation that for once no one was staring at her. At some point she knew she would have to stop walking. But she did not want to think about that.

Hinutet sat on the ground hugging her knees. She was staring at her brother with a very blank look on her face. A calloused hand grabbed her shoulder, and Alice made out a lined, feminine face peering at hers with unsmiling anxiety.

"How are you feeling, _moskimutit_?" Alice had to bite back a laugh. The familiar Lenape greeting suddenly sounded hilarious. She fought off the urge she knew was the first sign of hysteria and forced herself to give a sane reply.

"I-I feel well," she answered dutifully. It wasn't a lie. She _was_ fine, more fine than she had any right to be.

"Where is Temakwe?" she asked hoarsely.

Chiskukus pressed her lips together and shook her head. Not the shake of a woman reluctant to say something unpleasant, but the shake of a woman who did not know and was too tired and hassled to care. Alice swallowed and nodded. She tried not to look too dejected when the leathery hand left her shoulder. It ought to be a compliment that the senior woman believed she could handle herself. After all, apparently she could. She had managed to do what none of her older, cleverer and vastly more experienced family had been able to do.

A sour taste flooded her mouth. She wondered for a moment if she was going to be sick. The trees made her feel claustrophobic. Gritting her teeth against the nausea, she turned away from the older woman's receding back and resolved to keep moving for as long as her body and her mind would let her.

She saw him in the open clearing, where the light of the half-moon made his black hair shimmer in fleeting streaks of blue and white. He drifted among the corpses with feet that barely touched the ground and a face that looked even more drained and exhausted than she remembered. The sight of him made her want to hide. Second chances were for other people. Liars, murderers and oath-breakers did not get to redeem themselves.

He was walking in her direction, but he did not see her. His eyes swept over the gory aftermath as though he wanted nothing but to tear his gaze from it, but a sadistic power held them there and would not let him look away. The axe by his side was dripping blood onto the grass, as was the hand that held it, some of it his, most of it probably not.

He passed in front of her. She swallowed, and her throat felt dry again a half-second later. She fought to find her voice, but when she finally did it was almost inaudible even to her.

"Uncas…"

He did not hear her, nor did he stop walking.

SOMETHING LIKE A SOFT WIND interrupted the moans of the dying, but Uncas did not give it much attention. His thoughts were otherwise occupied. They kept returning to another massacre he had not seen, where the victims built their villages in the north and spoke a language he had never learned, and where some of the attackers wore red and not blue.

_Did you stay long enough to see what you had done? Or did you go back to hiding behind your walls without giving a second thought to the monster you created?_

He moved to put his tomahawk back in his belt and noticed something else felt missing. His right hand shifted to the spot where his knife should have been. He was not surprised to find it gone. He closed his eyes and tried to remember at what point he had thrown it away. When he located the appropriate memory, he realized it required him to walk back across the field of mourners. Annoyed, he turned around and found himself staring at the younger Munro daughter.

Her corn silk hair was lighter. Her skin, presumably, was darker, but against the black fabric of her shirt with the tree-filtered moonbeams playing chaotically on her shoulders, it looked a shade below midwinter snow. He discovered he was not at all shocked to see her there.

His feet moved toward her without his being aware of ever telling them to. Her green eyes drank in his, glimmering with an odd mixture of astonishment, despair and joy. The joy made him feel angrier than anything else. Did she think he was a romantic prince, that he could sweep her in his arms and carry her away from the slaughter? She should know better than that. He found himself wanting to grab her arms and shake her until the misplaced happiness vanished from her eyes and he made her realize he could never be anyone's savior.

Something of his thoughts must have shown in his face, because hers withdrew. She looked down, and he silently cursed himself for not being able to better hide his emotions. It wasn't her fault she had grown up sheltered and coddled. He supposed he ought to break the silence, but he found himself mesmerized by the awkward way she bit her lip and ran her fingers through her loose blonde hair. He reluctantly remembered the cool softness of those strands between his own fingers. It came as a relief when three voices shattered his temporary lapse of judgment, all of them familiar and all of them furious.

"You had a very simple job. Is it that hard to make her shut up and wait?"

"If that's all I am to you, Nathaniel Poe-"

"We didn't have a choice. Your rendezvous point turned into a French and Ottawa shindig about an hour after you left."

"Then hide. Knock her over the head if she won't listen."

"Would you want to be around when she came to?"

"Perhaps I should have let Jack escort me to Fort Edward. At least the men there have a sense of – oh, my -"

Whatever third commandment violation was waiting on Cora's lips died unfinished. The next few minutes consisted of a jumble of fierce embraces and semi-intelligible exclamations that Uncas marveled the two of them had the breath to utter. An uncomfortable silence followed when Cora finally released her stunned sister. For a long moment the five of them stared at each other wondering how to break it.

Jack stepped forward and removed his hat. "I reckon you don't remember me-" he began.

"Captain Winthrop!" Alice's eyes lit up in surprise. "Of course I remember you. You were the first person I ever saw shout at my father."

Cora looked aghast. Alice glanced at her sister and blushed. Nathaniel burst out laughing while Jack appeared to be trying to figure out if what she had just said could in any way be construed as a compliment.

"Way to make a first impression," Nathaniel remarked. "Good thing you weren't looking to marry the girl."

"Hello, Mister Poe," Alice said politely.

"Miss Munro," his brother replied in kind. Alice looked surprised at the address. Her eyes flickered to Cora. Uncas had never bothered to learn the social intricacies of the English, but he guessed that whenever the two of them had appeared in company, her older sister had always borne that title. He could only imagine what false conclusions Alice must be drawing from his brother's mistake.

"Would you please…explain yourselves?" she asked. "How are you here?"

Nathaniel looked rather offended.

"Well, weren't you listening?" he demanded. "When I say I'll find someone, I do. Or did you think we'd just walk out of the Huron camp and ditch?"

Her cheeks flushed slightly in the dark, which was almost as good as admitting that was exactly what she had thought.

"Silly girl," Cora said in a cracked voice. Out of the corner of his eye, Uncas saw his father appear silently behind Nathaniel. He whispered into his brother's ear. Nathaniel cleared his throat.

"Normally the Delaware have pretty good hospitality, but under the present circumstances…" He let his eyes survey the spotted array of bark-covered houses, most of which had burned and collapsed or were on the verge of doing so.

"Looks like we'll be sleeping outside again," Jack said with a grimace. He tipped his hat to Alice before departing in the direction of the woods. Nathaniel tapped Cora's shoulder and followed Jack. Uncas knew the rules they were supposed to observe. All of them were leaving to give the sisters some privacy. His father paused only a moment to spare a glance at the dark-haired one who was a woman and the light-haired one who was not quite a woman. His eyes narrowed as he looked at Alice. Then he departed, and Uncas followed. He followed him for a few paces and could not explain why he turned around.

The Munro sisters spoke to each other in whispers. Cora looked concerned, and Alice looked dazed. An unbidden ache rose in his chest that he tried to repress. She would not look at him now that her rightful protector had returned. He was neither entitled nor qualified to play that role.

"It's all right," Alice said softly. "I have somewhere to go."

Cora kissed her sister lightly on the forehead, squeezed her shoulder and followed Nathaniel. Uncas knew he had no reason to stay, but his eyes lingered on her silhouette as she gazed at the moon looking rather puzzled. The awkward silence rushed back to fill the space between them. At the moment he felt farther away from her than he had during their entire separation.

"What month is it?" she asked without taking her eyes off the sky.

"Late October," he replied, too grateful to have something to say to wonder at the oddness of her inquiry.

She tore her gaze from the white orb and shook her head. "Thank you," she said quietly. "I've lost track of time out here."

A small laugh escaped her lips. It sounded beautiful, but slightly broken, as though a part of her was laughing to keep from crying. He studied her face more closely in the half-light. Her eyes were no longer filled with the dark terror that had flooded them the last time he had seen her. But it hadn't vanished. Instead it seemed to have rooted itself more deeply until it coexisted with everything else inside her.

"I'm sorry," she said abruptly. "For what happened to your friends. The Camerons. I just…wanted to tell you that." She looked down, as if embarrassed, and started to move away. He should let her go. He would let her go.

"Did he hurt you?" he asked before he could stop himself. She glanced up, surprised. Then a look of comprehension dawned on her face.

"No," she replied.


	12. The Lines that Divide

Jack Winthrop twirled his three-cornered hat in his fingers nervously. He had practiced this for days, but the quizzical stare of the dark-eyed brunette in front of him left his memory inconveniently blank. He tried to stall for time by clearing his throat.

"Miss Munro," he began. "There's something I've been wanting to ask you. Something rather…personal."

He half-expected her to stop him right there. He half-wished she would. But she only looked at him politely and silently bade him to continue.

"I don't blame you if you don't feel the same way. I know I don't look like much compared to a woodsman like Nathaniel."

The space behind him felt oppressively quiet. This was turning out to be much harder than he expected. He raised his voice and tried to ignore the amused stare of the nineteen-year-old Mahican a few feet to his left.

"But I couldn't just let you go off with him without telling you. I can't…offer you anything stable. Yet. But if you wanted to come with me, I would do my best to…"

He couldn't think of any more obvious way to articulate his feelings, so he knelt to the ground. He didn't know how long he remained in that ridiculous position, with Cora Munro staring at him like he was one of her delirious patients. It felt like an eternity until, to his immense relief, Nathaniel's voice cut in and put an end to his embarrassment.

"Just what do you think you're doing?" Nathaniel demanded.

"What does it look like I'm doing?" Jack returned angrily, getting to his feet. "I'm doing what you should have done months ago, you _idiot_."

Nathaniel looked awkwardly at Cora. Up until that point, Jack had never known Nathaniel Poe could blush.

"Cora," Nathaniel said slowly. "I know things haven't been great, and there hasn't exactly been a good time for this. With everything that was going on, I thought you might rather not…"

"Oh, you thought?" Cora asked. Nathaniel winced.

"I mean, if you'd like too-"

"No," Cora replied smoothly.

"No," he repeated. "Fine. The woods are open. I can take you to Fort Edward once they finish patching things up around here. Or Jack can, if you'd rather go sooner."

"No, I don't want to have this conversation right now," Cora said coolly. She fixed him with a glare and turned on her heel.

"Good luck, brother," Uncas said, shoving him in the direction Cora had stormed off.

Jack suddenly became aware of the sizable crowd that had amassed to watch the scene. Knowing full well that the majority of them couldn't understand a word he said anyway, he jerked his thumb at Uncas and muttered, "Well, it was _his_ idea."

Cora and Nathaniel emerged from the forest later that evening holding hands. No one ever figured out exactly what was said between them, but Nathaniel looked relieved and Cora looked quite pleased.

ALICE HAD ALWAYS PREFERRED DUSK over dawn. She had never been able to relate to the blind optimism of sunrise. But she savored the quiet moments of twilight, when the day stopped struggling and resigned itself to its scars and disappointments. A scarred sunset seemed fitting for a scarred village. Teme had limped away from the assault with a bullet in his right shoulder and his left leg, rendering both limbs useless for weeks afterward. But instead of humbling him, his survival had the obnoxious effect of making him think himself more of a demigod than he had before. Temakwe had been less lucky.

She spent the last hour of daylight tending the late-growing sage and squash in his garden. Practically speaking she knew it was a complete waste of time. Everyone in the village had their own gardens. No one needed what little was left to save from behind the dead herbalist's house. But in the fading light, she could imagine the garden with all its neglected and useless life belonged to her. And she could watch the evening die next to a boy who looked at the useless things with a compassion wholly at odds with the contempt more common in his white brother.

"You really are quite evil, you know," she told him.

"It had to be Jack," he replied. "I don't think your sister would have believed a proposal from me."

Alice cocked her head to one side and considered that scenario. A larger part of her than she was willing to admit expected to feel jealous, but the picture that appeared in her mind was too ridiculous to permit even that.

"They're going to argue a lot, aren't they?" she said. He laughed, a deep, rich laugh that echoed like distant thunder. She liked thinking that she could make him laugh, almost as much as she liked hearing it. He spoke again. The laughter had not vanished from his voice, but it had a serious edge that had not been there before.

"Would you rather that I had been the one asking your sister to marry me?"

She felt his dark eyes on her, and she was afraid to look at them. Perhaps if she were older, or braver, or prettier, she could find the words to tell him that he made her feel less lonely than she could remember feeling since she had left Scotland. Perhaps then she could forget the cold eyes that had not closed and the chilling power of watching them glaze over knowing she had made it happen. Perhaps then she would stop wondering what he would think of her if she told him, if he could make it stop bothering her, or if he would understand that she did not want it to stop bothering her. Perhaps then she would know why one part of her thought he made the loneliness disappear, and another part of her thought he made it a thousand times worse.

THE SACHEM'S HOUSE WAS NOT small. Compared to the other bark-covered huts in the village it was fairly large, and it was not cluttered with the elaborate trappings or brightly colored trade goods a man of his status would have been entitled to own. The sparse furnishings of the wikwam suggested a man who valued practicality over luxury. But even though the house had space for several times more occupants than the four seated on the floor, Uncas couldn't help thinking it felt crowded. Natenummen had opened his door to their family out of an old friendship with Chingachgook. Barely half an hour into the reunion, Nathaniel had unwisely but unsurprisingly chosen to turn the occasion into a fight.

"Your sickly-faced brothers have been blowing each other's brains out since before you were born," Natenummen said dismissively. "In case you haven't noticed, we are still standing." The casualty rate of the last attack made that statement only three-fourths correct, but no one in the room was going to argue over figures.

"For now," Nathaniel replied evenly. "How long do you reckon you'll last when the next wave of Hurons comes down from the north?"

"It doesn't matter how many allies Montcalm thinks he can command. They're not all willing to spill their blood for their great white fathers."

"It matters when his people have muskets and yours don't," Nathaniel snapped. "Just because I'm the first person to point that out to you doesn't make it less true."

"You're not," Natenummen said curtly. "The first one's dead. They carried him out of his garden with a bullet in his forehead."

His brother remained silent for a moment after that remark, but his face showed more annoyance than sympathy. When he responded, the words came out in Lenape.

"And you are willing to sit by and let that happen again?"

The sachem's face hardened.

"What would you have me do, Nathaniel Poe?" he asked in English. His meaning was obvious. If Nathaniel was going to question his authority, he had better not have the audacity to use Natenummen's own language, and Nathaniel clearly got the message.

"If you have any suggestions, please share them," Natenummen said coldly.

"Leave," Nathaniel replied without hesitation. "Take your people to Ohio. Get out of here."

"And is running away your solution to everything?" Natenummen asked with irritation. "You and your family may be able to leave whenever a situation gets inconvenient, but some of us have responsibilities."

"There's a war on your borders," Nathaniel said hotly. "Isn't it your responsibility not to let your people get dragged into it?"

Uncas glanced at his father. Usually at this point Chingachgook would have stepped in to chastise his white son, but judging by the look on his face, he seemed to think Natenummen was doing a perfectly good job putting Nathaniel in his place himself.

"What you are suggesting is suicide," Natenummen said. "You won't last very long once the cold sets in."

"And you won't last very long against the Huron and the Ottawa without guns," Nathaniel retorted. "How many more of your people do you feel like losing?"

"If they are foolish enough to cross the wilderness right before winter, I wouldn't consider it much of a loss," the sachem said dryly.

Chingachgook looked mildly amused. Nathaniel looked frustrated. Uncas couldn't understand why his brother was so determined to win the argument. Natenummen was not Munro. He did not have the power to stop anyone from leaving and, judging by the conversation, he did not have the inclination either.

"But perhaps there are more fools here than I thought," the sachem said with mock consideration. "If you can find anyone else who shares your opinion, feel free to weed them out."

Nathaniel accepted the unfriendly offer of truce without looking any less disgruntled. The cold silence that followed persisted through the rest of the evening, and Uncas was relieved when his father brought an end to the strained attempts at small talk and dismissed them from the house.

UNCAS COULD NEVER RECALL HATING a sunset, much less one with as many breathtaking streaks of purple, pink and orange as the one that stained the western sky in front of him. It was difficult not to hate this one, though. The dying light had a curious effect on the girl next to him. It brightened the gold strands of her hair and lent a rosier glow to her face, making her look positively radiant. If he stared at her long enough, he could almost make himself believe she belonged among the open skies and tree-studded mountains.

Her voice had drifted unconsciously into a soft Scottish accent. He secretly enjoyed the way the syllables rolled off her tongue and the embarrassed way her hand would fly to her mouth if he ever pointed it out. But tonight the sound grated against his ears, because it reminded him of all the empty places inside her he could never hope to fill.

"I don't want to go back inside," she said, shivering beneath the folds of her shirt. "They're arguing again. They think I don't understand them, but I do."

"Then they should go outside," he replied. "A wikwam is too small a space for quarrels."

"Even quarrels between women?"

"Especially those," he answered. He heard a soft exhale of breath beside him, but he did not look to see if he had made her smile.

"All they ever do now is fight," she said. "Except when they don't. And that's worse."

"Hinutet is determined to go, then?"

Alice nodded. "Her mother told her if she wanted to leave she could, but never to bother coming back again."

She rested her chin on her knees thoughtfully. "I don't think she meant it. I saw her crying behind the wikwam this afternoon. It won't make Hinutet stay, though."

Her words left another question hanging in the air. But it would be pointless to ask her if she would stay. The Ohio tribes had little reason to love the British, and while he knew most of the people there probably would not fault her for her ancestors, there were some who would. He hesitated a moment, weighing the possible consequences of asking a question he already knew the answer to. Against his better judgment, he asked it anyway.

Alice shook her head.

"I have to get away from here," she said quietly. "And I don't want to be left behind." She paused and fingered the hem of her brown skirt. "I heard them talking. They said they were going to head south and pass within a few miles of Fort Edward."

She bit her lip. He knew what she was about to say, and he did not have the will to talk her out of it, because beneath every selfish thought that told him sitting next to her felt more right than anywhere else he could remember, pretending it could be anything more would only hurt them both. A moment passed before she looked up again.

"Would you take me there, Uncas?"


	13. Children's Games

When Alice was very little, she used to play at hunting with the more juvenile members of her father's manor. One of them would drape on a discarded bed sheet and play the part of the legendary white hart, and the rest of the ragtag group would race the beast to the ground. The first one to catch the hart would take his place in the next round. The last one had to leave. Someone had to lose, the older boys explained, otherwise no one could win. It did not seem entirely logical to Alice, who thought the initial conqueror ought to claim the victory and make everyone else losers by default, but they were her seniors, which made what they said correct. Alice was usually the youngest and the smallest and the slowest, so she never lasted very long in those contests.

_Now we are five_, she thought with a shiver. The woods felt unnaturally quiet. She discovered she had grown accustomed to the din of clanking pottery and barking dogs in the village. But the return to the wilderness seemed to have awed even Cora, Nathaniel and Captain Winthrop into silence. There would be little chance of rescue if they were attacked out here. Chingachgook and the Ohio-bound Lenape were probably more than two leagues away by now. She wondered if Hinutet knew her older brother had been following her from behind for the last three days. Then she thought, with a twinge of envy, that at least Hinutet had someone to follow her.

"We can't go with you all the way to Edward," Cora said with the familiar downward gaze that was the nearest to awkwardness she ever showed. "If anyone recognized Nathaniel, it could cause problems."

"You could have the memorable wedding you always wanted," Alice pointed out. Cora made a valiant effort to stifle a smile.

"While the gallows would make for a unique ceremony, I think I'd rather not." She pressed her lips together and surveyed her sister with a critical look Alice recognized from years of exposure. "I wish we could find something more respectable for you to wear before you get to the fort. I worry about you going in front of all those soldiers looking like an uncivilized wanton."

Alice had to fight a smile of her own. "I am not the one who spent the last three months tramping through the wilderness with four unmarried men," she said primly. Cora sighed.

"I suppose you'll have to revise that part for our mutual acquaintance and tell them Nathaniel and I were married right after we left William Henry," she said in a resigned voice. "By a priest who was not there in a church that did not exist."

"No," Alice said thoughtfully. "I think I'll just have to tell them you died." Cora blushed. They both knew some of their former circle would probably prefer that version.

"You know, you don't have to go," Cora said after a moment's hesitation. A note of pleading had seeped into her coffee-brown irises. Alice swallowed and tried to suppress the growing part of her that did not want to hear those words from Cora. She had thought Uncas might at least ask her if she was serious about leaving. But he had simply _agreed _to take her to Edward, which was a clear sign that he indulged rather than enjoyed her company. There were some games it was easier not to play at all.

"I will be sorry to miss your wedding," Alice said lightly. "Unless you want to ask Captain Winthrop to marry you and Nathaniel right here. A ship's captain can do it, and no one in England will know the difference…"

UNCAS HAD NEVER MINDED THE cold. The sting on his hands and face made him more alert, and there was no moon tonight, so he needed something to sharpen his senses. He thought out of some vague notion of fraternal duty he should be keeping watch with Nathaniel, as this was probably the last night they would spend in the same place for a very long time. Tomorrow he and Alice would have to strike out for the fort on their own. So far they had been fortunate enough to miss any English scouting parties that might be returning, but they were barely fifteen miles from Edward, and no one wanted to test their luck any further. He supposed the addition of one day would make little difference to him. His plans had not been changed, merely delayed. Cora, Nathaniel and Jack would go to Cantuckee, and he would join his father in Ohio. The thought left him feeling emptier than it should have.

His attention drifted to the creature walking behind him, obviously trying very hard not to be noticed. He considered letting her continue believing she had succeeded, but the careless snap of a twig ended that possibility. He turned around to look at the younger Munro sister. It was dark, but he was almost certain she was blushing.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt," she said quickly.

Part of him wanted to ask what she thought she was interrupting, as he was completely alone, but he thought she might interpret the innocent question as sarcasm. He nodded towards a soft spot on the grass, wondering if she would accept the invitation. She considered the proposition a moment before sitting down next to him and smoothing her skirt over her ankles.

"Were you looking for your sister?" he asked. She pondered the question.

"I was looking for Cora," she said. "But my sister and her fiancé seem rather occupied at the moment." Her voice possessed a dreamy, not-quite-there quality that made her sound younger than eighteen.

"I doubt they would notice right now if the entire French army marched in," he remarked. A soft noise that sounded distinctly like a snort rose from her throat. Alice hastily covered her mouth and blushed even more fiercely. Uncas tried unsuccessfully to suppress a smile.

"I don't suppose I'll be able to write very often," she mused. Uncas felt a momentary stab of pity for her self-preserving logic. They could not leave her behind if she left them first.

"What will you do after they're gone?" she asked.

Alexandria Cameron's voice suddenly interrupted his thoughts as a nagging reminder of where he should have been by now. Words like "settled down" and "a Delaware-speaking woman" reverberated in his mind. He tried to think ahead to when the conversation had turned to trapping and Dutch silver. Anything to avoid saying he wanted a woman who spoke broken Delaware with a Scottish accent.

"Trap furs with my father out west," he replied. "And keep away from the British traders." He realized too late that she probably would not know enough about the economics of the fur trade to take his last remark as anything but an insult. But she did not look offended, a fact he attributed more to ignorance than anything else.

"I suppose it will feel strange," she said. "Without your brother, I mean."

Her words twisted unpleasantly inside him. He had known in the back of his mind that this autumn would be the last the three of them would spend as a family, but it was supposed to be him doing the leaving. The Munro sisters had effectively wrecked that future. And he, his father and his brother had let them. He could not blame Cora for breaking their family apart anymore than he could blame Nathaniel for finding a happiness that he could not share.

"No stranger than it will feel for you without your sister," he returned. She looked a little disconcerted that the topic of conversation had switched back to her.

"What's it like here in the winter?" Her question startled him. She bit her lip, apparently looking for some way to justify the abrupt change in subject. "For them, that is. I want to be able to picture them in my head after they're gone."

Uncas leaned back on the grass, wondering how to describe almost two decades of living in the middle of nowhere to a girl who had probably never wandered ten feet beyond the reach of a servant or an escort.

"It's possible they'll decide to join us and winter with the Ohio Delaware," he said after a pause. "Our father used to take us to their camps further east. There was never as much to do then, so we usually passed the time telling stories or ice fishing."

He cast a sidelong glance at her, more than half expecting her to look bored. But he thought he detected a glimmer of hunger flickering out of her emerald eyes. He didn't know what about his upbringing drew that kind of yearning from her, but he wanted to imprint that look in his memory for as long as possible, so he kept talking.

"It's harder for families like the Camerons. There's no one around for at least twelve miles to help out if anything goes wrong. Unless they let us raid their food stores in exchange for keeping guard for a few weeks." Which had happened twice, although the second time they had been involuntarily snowed in for almost a month, so he was not sure it counted.

Alice dropped her eyes at the mention of the Camerons. Her depression puzzled him. After all, they had not been her friends. It took him another moment to realize, with a twinge of betrayal, that the memories had stopped feeling painful.

"It's not right," she said with uncharacteristic vehemence. "He shouldn't have talked to you like that. And he shouldn't have kept parents away from their children."

Uncas rolled the pronoun over in his head a few times. As good as it felt to hear her defend him, following her line of thinking was a bit like trying to follow a very drunk bird in a rainstorm.

"I think your sister at least shares your opinion," he offered. He hoped that remark might be enough to mollify her, as he could not think of anything kind to say about Munro. But judging by the way she was pulling at the grass with her fingers, he had only succeeded in making her feel worse, and he had no idea why.

"I was looking down on her," she said in a low voice. "I came to the Americas because I wanted to make them feel guilty for leaving. I'm…really terrible, aren't I?"

Uncas did not know what to say to that. However, he knew she would take his silence for assent. Acting on impulse, he reached out and let his hand brush against her hair. The motion sent a ripple of shock down her spine. But instead of pulling away, as he half assumed she would, she reached across the grass and hesitantly traced the back of his other hand with her fingertips. It occurred to him that there was something in his world this pampered English girl wanted and had probably wanted her entire life. Then it occurred to him at that moment, with his face so close to hers he could smell the apple cider scent of her hair, he could give her a reason to stay and she might accept it.

She blushed and pulled her fingers back, and the moment passed. Feeling slightly rejected, Uncas withdrew his hand, carefully avoiding any more signs of untoward conduct. When he did, she flinched as though she had been the one rejected. Feeling even more puzzled, he stood up. He wondered if he ought to help her to her feet, or if she would view that as too forward as well. She got up on her own before he could make up his mind, and for the rest of the walk she carefully avoided looking at him.

He would never have told her so, but her behavior confirmed everything Chingachgook had ever told him about English women. They were a breed apart, and they made no sense.

FOR ONCE ALICE WAS GRATEFUL for the dark, as it made it easier to hide the color in her cheeks and the tears of humiliation springing in her eyes for no legitimate reason. She did not want to imagine the awkwardness that would have ensued had she let him do what she temporarily suspected he had been about to do. But any rebuff was difficult, no matter how justified. Had he truly felt anything for her at all, he would not have let a small concern like her own feelings stand in the way.

The dead leaves crunched beneath their heels as they made their way back to camp in silence. The two feet between them might as well have been an impassable canyon.

_Duncan or Nathaniel would have been more audacious_, she thought bitterly.

Uncas halted. Without warning, his arm shot out of the darkness and he pulled her into his chest. For a wild moment, Alice thought he had changed his mind about his intentions towards her. The crushing pressure of his arm around her waist and the smell of earth and sweat on his shirt made her skin prickle. It was not an entirely disagreeable sensation. Then she heard the crunch of several footsteps that did not belong to them and felt foolish. Of course their relationship was no more than that of a bodyguard to his charge.

Uncas relaxed his grip and nudged her behind him without turning around. She did not need to ask why. A musket required two hands to operate. She would be in the way. Trying to push aside her disappointment, she peered over his shoulder at the orange torches weaving through the trees. At least half a dozen faces flickered into life as they bobbed closer. White faces, her mind registered dimly, and she was not sure if she felt relieved. The lack of any military uniforms made it impossible to tell which side they belonged to.

"Look at this, doctor. I think we've stumbled across a pack of lost deer. Five, if I can count." The speaker inspected his hand, as if to ascertain that there were in fact five fingers on it. He was one of the filthier ones, although on closer inspection Alice decided they all looked filthy.

"It appears that you can. Congratulations. I'm sure your mother would be quite proud of you." Exhaustion drowned out most of the disdain the second speaker undoubtedly wanted to convey. The voice was dry, tired and riddlingly familiar. Somewhere in the jumbled mess of memories, Alice discovered her voice.

"Mister Phelps?"

He pushed his way forward to the front of the group like a haggard, baggy-eyed ghost in blue cotton. Blinking and bewildered, he stared at them through the torchlight. The loose hang of his clothing over his shoulders gave him the appearance of an underfed scarecrow.

"It's not possible," said the physician. "Cora Munro."


	14. The Munro Legacy

Cora took an involuntary step backward. There was a time the sight of one of her father's oldest friends would have filled her with a girlish desire to throw her arms around his waist and inhale the reassuring smell of tobacco and acetone. But apparently she had reached a point where the familiar shocked her more than the strange.

"What's this, Rupert?" The tall man standing to Mr. Phelps' left let his eyes flicker from Cora to Alice and back again. "Didn't realize we'd attracted camp followers."

"You'll want to be more careful around Colonel Munro's daughters, Josiah Ashby," Mr. Phelps said in a mild but slightly dangerous voice. He turned back to Cora. "I don't believe it."

A few of the looks the colonials exchanged among themselves after surveying the state of their clothing suggested they didn't believe it either. Mr. Phelps brushed past them until he was close enough to embrace her. He had always been careful about showing too much affection for his commander's daughters, but it was no secret that he favored the elder. Cora peered uncertainly into the half-lit tree line. The semicircle of plainclothes soldiers behind him had grown from six to more than a dozen. They looked every bit as hard and weather-beaten as the former militiamen Jack and Ian had been leading to Cantuckee, but there was a wildness in their eyes the other colonials had lacked. It was almost, she thought irrationally, as though the frontier had possessed _them_ instead of the other way around.

Ashby dropped his gaze. "My mistake," he said. He had the decency to look somewhat embarrassed, although the skepticism on his face indicated he thought the mistake rather easy to make. Cora tried to clear her head, a task made more difficult by the several questions competing for attention inside it. She settled for the one she hoped would sound the least rude.

"How have you been?"

Mr. Phelps hesitated. Dark circles sagged underneath his eyes, his cheeks had sunken into his face, and he bore the overall appearance of a man who had lost a great deal of weight in a very short amount of time. "I'm fine," he said, in a tone that implied his respect for her would drop several orders of magnitude if she believed him.

He glanced uneasily to one side. He seemed to want to continue the conversation in private, but before he moved away he looked at Alice, who was still standing in the same transfixed posture as she had when he had first appeared. He nodded over Cora's shoulder to Jack and Nathaniel and jerked his head in Alice's direction, as though he did not like the idea of leaving her alone. But Uncas seemed to have intercepted them. Appearing satisfied, Mr. Phelps tapped Cora's shoulder and led her to a more secluded area.

"Thank God you're alive," he said when they were out of earshot. "You have no idea how good it is to see you again." Cora started to return the compliment, but the rational part of her mind drowned out the reflex.

"You shouldn't be out here," she said, her confusion giving more forcefulness to her voice than usual.

"You think I am too feeble?" His lips forced a smile that did not reach his eyes.

"I think you are too old," Cora corrected him. "And I don't think much of a general who would send a doctor away from the infirmary." Mr. Phelps shrugged his shoulders in a thoroughly unconvincing attempt at nonchalance.

"General Webb feels the colonials are too valuable to risk losing every time they go off on one of their skirmishes. And I believe he found my presence at Edward…disruptive to morale."

"You, an agitator?" She tried to picture the mild-mannered physician stirring up discontent among the ranks. Under different circumstances the idea would have made her laugh, but another glance at the exhaustion in his face forced her to swallow the impulse. He rubbed his hands along his knees uncomfortably.

"We both know your father was a tyrant, Cora, but at least he knew how to rule. His superior turns a blind eye to anything questionable that goes on outside his war room."

"How long have you been…?" Her voice trailed off. He seemed to guess she was referring to his new travelling companions.

"Long enough," he said. "Forgive me. Most of the colonials at Edward are a decent sort, but this lot is an absolute nuisance on their best days."

"If they're so bad, I'm wonder that Webb doesn't dismiss them," Cora remarked. Mr. Phelps snorted.

"Don't think I haven't suggested it. No one would miss them if he did. But Webb thinks it's better to turn them loose every few weeks so they can vent their overactive spleens fighting the right kind of savage."

Cora shivered. "I suppose Webb would not be the kind to ask questions when they return," she concluded.

"He doesn't care as long as it keeps them from quarreling with the Mohawk. There are times I almost wish-" He stopped. He looked embarrassed, then apologetic at the line of thought he was apparently unwilling to finish. "I can't wait to get off this continent, Cora."

Cora fingered the hem of her skirt. "I'm sorry," she said. It did not feel like the right thing to say. She did not think there _was_ a right thing to say, but long silences had always made her feel uncomfortable. The physician did not react one way or the other to her attempt at sympathy.

"You might advise your sister to keep her distance from the younger Mahican," he added in a lower voice.

Cora folded her arms into her shirt. There was slight tone of censure in his voice that she did not like, as though she had neglected her duty as an older sister. She considered pretending she had no idea what he was talking about, but she doubted he would believe her if she did, and she respected him too much to insult his intelligence like that. She bit her lip, wondering how much he knew or guessed about her relationship with Nathaniel. It surprised her to discover there were occasions on which she could remain silent. And, she reflected, there was really nothing she could say to close the gap their sudden reunion had thrown into light. He was inextricably tied to the old world, and she had aligned herself to the new. So she contented herself with a mute nod and shivered again.

THE ABRUPT RESTORATION OF THEIR numbers did not reassure Alice the way she would have expected it to. She was starting to learn that numbers did not guarantee safety, and in many cases they only served to jeopardize it. And these colonials made so much noise she could almost believe they wanted to be attacked.

There was a gloom in the sun as it lowered itself to the horizon, as though it were ashamed of its failure to stop the onset of winter. Trying to dispel the loneliness she usually felt in crowds, she brushed a stray hair behind her ear. Nathaniel seldom had anything to say to her. Captain Winthrop was generally more cheerful than his friend, but the nearness of Fort Edward had filled both men with silent anxiety. Uncas was silent as a rule. Still, for reasons beyond her comprehension, he seemed to have been deliberately avoiding her for the entire day. And Cora, while she had insisted on accompanying them, refused to tell her _why_ and had spent most of the day walking beside Mr. Phelps. If any of the colonials came near her, she turned away with a coldness Alice found shocking. It was not like Cora to be so judgmental.

The sudden noises of halting to make camp filled her with a childish terror. Gathering in one large group made her introversion so much more noticeable. She supposed the social abandonment of her family and friends was understandable. It was preparation for what awaited her at Edward. From this point on she would have to make her own friends.

For now at least, it seemed her new acquaintance consisted of several vulgar, ill-educated frontiersmen. An instant sting of embarrassment followed that thought and the unjust prejudice behind it. Their companions were rough and a bit rude, but certainly not bad. After all, Captain Winthrop was a decent person. And without Cora to vouch for her, it would be easy for complete strangers to mistake shyness for snobbery. It was fault she would just have to overcome, that was all.

Alice scanned the terrain, trying to decide which of the colonials looked the most friendly and approachable. When that failed, she settled for the only one whose full name she could remember. Reaching for a courage she did not feel, she moved in his direction.

"Mister Ashby." The hesitance in her voice made the greeting sound more like a question. The settler glanced up at her through his unkempt blond hair. He looked surprised at her daring. For a moment Alice felt triumphant. Then she realized she had not thought of anything to say.

"You came from Fort Edward?" she asked after a moment of awkward silence, blushing immediately at the obviousness of the question.

"There and some other places," he said vaguely. She had the distinct impression Ashby was trying to bait her. She did not like being toyed with, so she decided this time to let him break the silence. Her companion, evidently discerning that his conversational ploy had failed, obliged.

"If I may say, Miss Munro, I was a great admirer of your father."

"Thank you, sir," she replied. _There, that response was easy enough_, she thought. The unexpected politeness made her rather happy to be proven wrong about him.

"Ghastly way to go. He was good man. He deserved better than what he got – though I guess the Hurons wouldn't have seen it that way."

"I suppose to them he was just another Englishman," Alice said uncertainly. That did not quite fit with everything she had seen, but he was a colonel. Perhaps the Hurons reserved special punishments for the leaders of their enemies. For some reason her response made Ashby laugh.

"I very much doubt that, Miss Munro," he said, without bothering to conceal his amusement.

"I'm sorry?"

He raised an eyebrow. Then he dug his foot into the ground in a posture that almost resembled thoughtfulness.

"I've heard about their ideas of war back in Europe. March onto a wide-open field, exchange a few volleys, call it day? Civilized warfare." He shook his head. "Only works if your enemy plays by civilized rules. And they don't out here… though you probably already know something about that." Ashby glanced at her in a way that made her feel very uncomfortable. She was starting to regret her spontaneous impulse to initiate conversation. Her companion did not appear to notice her uneasiness.

"Your father was smarter," he continued. "Much smarter than the higher-up bigwigs like Webb. And he wasn't afraid to do what was needed, if you take my meaning."

Alice swallowed. "I'm afraid I don't, sir," she said. She had a feeling she did not want to hear whatever came next, but she could see no tactful way to extract herself. Ashby, to her irritation, laughed again.

"Damn," he said. "You didn't honestly think your father could just fight the French at their forts, did you?" He peered at her curiously, as if to ascertain her age or, perhaps more accurately, her degree of naiveté. Alice flushed under the scrutiny. She did not know how to say so out loud, but she was sure it showed in her face that she _had_ thought that and did not know what else she was _supposed_ to have thought. Ashby broke the examination and regarded her with bemused sympathy. "How old are you, anyway?"

UNCAS HAD NEVER SPENT MUCH time pondering what his father had meant when he said English women made no sense. He had just accepted as a given that they were a different species, fellow inhabitants to be acknowledged when necessary and otherwise ignored. So it rather galled him that he could be transfixed by the irrational behavior of someone like Alice Munro. He could not understand why she would seek out the company of a man like Josiah Ashby. She clearly did not have any particular liking for him. What she was trying to prove or who she was trying to impress was beyond him. But as long as her companion did not do anything stupid, which Uncas thought would be asking a great deal, who she talked to was her own business.

It was not without some satisfaction, though, that he watched her suddenly straighten her shoulders and quit the settler's company. Uncas felt an even deeper satisfaction upon noting that he had to all appearances pissed her off. She was not paying much attention to where she was going. When she was roughly three steps away from crashing into him, he softly cleared his throat. She looked up. The shock left an odd combination of anger and surprise frozen on her face.

"Personal insult?" he ventured cautiously.

"It's nothing personal," she said coolly. "I hate anyone who lies about my father on principle."

Uncas was momentarily baffled. "I didn't know Ashby knew your father."

"Obviously he didn't, if he expects me to believe he would massacre dozens of innocent people." She crossed her arms over her chest. Her hands were buried beneath her shirt, but Uncas guessed that underneath her knuckles were white with suppressed rage. He searched for a way to diffuse the situation. Rather awkwardly, he put his hand on her shoulder. She shrugged it off and glared at him with a ferocity which he knew better than to take personally. "My father doesn't murder _children_."

Uncas dropped his hand. He was at a loss on what to do with this Alice. Of the two Munro sisters, he had always thought Cora had a monopoly on fury. But even in their anger they remained opposites. Cora's rage blazed like a wildfire that burned itself out when there was nothing left to consume. Alice's resembled the low thunder of a river dammed for years: deeper, quieter and infinitely less forgiving.

"You should forget it," he said finally. "Whatever grudge Magua had against your father doesn't make a difference now."

He caught himself a split second after the words had escaped his mouth. For one very wishful moment, he hoped that she might be oblivious enough not to notice. But the look on her face suggested she was only a few seconds behind him. She pressed her lips together, obviously thinking less about what he had said than what she would say next.

"I never said it had anything to do with Magua," she said slowly. She looked up at him with wide, confused eyes. He could not shut out those eyes, begging him to treat her like a woman and not a girl when they both knew a part of her always would be a girl.

"Don't lie to me," she said quietly. Uncas hesitated. A very large piece of him wanted to keep drawing this out. She would hate him soon enough. It was difficult not to feel contempt for her naïve hero worship of her father. But he had not wanted to be the one to break her.

"Please don't lie to me," she repeated. He knew where this would lead, and in spite of all his better judgment he could not deny her. It was, he supposed, a fitting end. Something so fragile and ephemeral could never have lasted in his world. She would return to her pompous, pampered relations and grow old surrounded by dozens of pompous, pampered grandchildren and he would be just one more in a history of men who had disillusioned her.

"Your father's men raided Magua's village and killed his family," he said, deciding a blunt answer would be best. He suffered another glance at her to see the effect of the announcement. Alice furrowed her eyebrows.

"I see," she said with a concentrated frown. "So my father couldn't stop them." The admission seemed to require a great deal of effort on her part. Uncas stared at her in amazement. He could not believe her self-imposed blindness, that she was still determined to look for a way to acquit him. He had no idea why she felt so devoted to a father who had probably never shown the same devotion to her. It was childish, a childishness he found both disarming and despicable.

"No. He was there, Alice."

Alice paled and looked down. If she had cried, or shouted at him, or burst into tears, he could have dealt with it. Or perhaps not, but those at least would have been normal reactions. He could have passed her off to her sister or someone more qualified to comfort her than he was. But her eyes remained dry and empty. They started to glaze over with a familiar dark void, and he knew she had withdrawn into a place where he could not reach her.

"Oh," she said. She stepped backwards. He started to extend his arm again but stopped when he remembered that he could not very well pull her out of an abyss that he had forced her into. She jerked away before he could complete the motion. Without speaking, she turned and ran in the opposite direction. As her figure shrank and vanished, he wondered if there was a name for the tainted feeling creeping from his chest to his fingertips and decided it was something akin to the feeling after murder.


	15. Veritas

"_Alice! Cora! Why are you here? And where the hell…"_

Edmund Munro had always prided himself on efficiency, so the brusque nature of his greeting at William Henry had not stung her the way it might have stung a child used to more affection. It was enough to hear the sound of his voice calling out her name. At least Alice had told herself as much as he draped his coat across her shoulders and ushered her inside the fort. Then she had listened in mute silence while he and Duncan and Cora talked about things she did not understand and did not want to understand. She had only opened her mouth to speak twice that night, and both times it had been useless. Questions such as _are you all right_ and _what's going to happen_ failed to express what she really wanted to say. But that was a thought she never could have voiced aloud.

_Papa, you look so small._

His arms had felt thinner than she remembered when he embraced her. She had supposed, back then, it was only natural that after two years' absence he would not tower over her as much. She had even thought with some satisfaction that it meant she was growing up. Seventeen was a much more sober, enlightened age than fifteen. It had not crossed her mind that the frontier might have actually _shrunk_ her father. That perhaps, while she had gotten older, he had gotten old.

Alice dug her fingers into the frost-kissed grass, letting the cold air bite her arms. Around her an indifferent sea of black and green trees stretched their arms towards an equally indifferent sky. There was something reassuring in their oldness and vastness, something that gave her the feeling she could drown in her own insignificance. The sensation of being overlooked used to bother her, but she supposed there were worse things to be than invisible. For a while she nursed the uncharitable thought that the wilderness had cut out her father's heart long before a revenge-crazed Huron had.

"_This conversation is over. Get out."_

Her father was severe by nature, but he had always treated even his lowest servants with respect. For as long as she could remember, he had never said anything so…_barbaric_. Back at William Henry she could not help marveling that such forceful words could come from such a frail, shriveled man. Her father had seemed to diminish next to Nathaniel and Captain Winthrop. A pathetic king grasping for control over a land that cared nothing for him or the toy soldiers he had brought with him. A sad little pawn who thought he was a knight.

It should not have surprised her that her father could turn out to be just as corrupt as the rest of them. She had seen the same darkness in the hard masks Nathaniel and his father wore. She had seen it lurking in the exhausted eyes of her sister and Mr. Phelps every time they had returned from another campaign. And in a lonely-eyed murderer named Uncas, who walked alone because he had never learned to wear a mask, or perhaps he disdained to wear one. Even he could not fight off the shadow the Americas cast over their inhabitants. One by one, it would infect them all.

Her relations in Portman Square had been right the entire time, she thought. The people here were all savages. This continent _made_ them savage.

NATHANIEL TOOK A BREAK FROM cleaning his musket to wipe a drop of cold sweat off his brow. It did not, on reflection, really need to be cleaned. He had not even had an occasion to fire it in weeks. But the act of taking it apart and inspecting each piece gave him something to do, and he was bored out of his mind. That and it gave the impression he was busier than he actually was.

"You've been ditched," Jack observed. Nathaniel did his best to hide the flush of red he could feel rising to his face, which, given the cold, did not accomplish much. He kept his attention firmly focused on the equipment in front of him, waiting for an appropriate stretch of time before dignifying the comment with a response.

"We're both adults," he said finally. "It's not like we have to spend every minute together."

Jack nodded wisely. "Right. Because an ordinary man would be jealous if his fiancée spent the entire day walking next to another man."

"Jealous?" Nathaniel repeated. "Of an overweight middle-aged doctor?"

Jack evidently thought this was in the realm of possibility as he crossed his arms over his chest and raised an eyebrow. Nathaniel thought this meant they had far too much time on their hands. "Go bother my brother," he suggested roughly.

"Your brother isn't nearly as entertaining. He'll just ignore me," Jack replied. Which made Uncas a much smarter man than he was, Nathaniel thought. But then Uncas had not had to watch the girl he was supposed to marry pretend that he did not exist for a whole day. He was perfectly aware that Cora was doing it for his own good, and that knowledge made it substantially worse because it deprived him of the right to complain.

"You about finished with that?" Jack asked in a lower voice. He glanced up. Jack nodded towards the trees to their right. Nathaniel squinted in the darkness. Most of the trees were bare, but that made little difference in terms of visibility on a moonless night. He seized the remaining two pieces of his musket while calculating how much time it would take to put them all together if he had to use them. The resulting figure was not particularly reassuring. Yielding to a rare pragmatic cowardice, he inched behind Jack while they waited for the soft tramping of footsteps to take shape.

"Hello? Is someone there?" Nathaniel felt his muscles relax at the voice of Rupert Phelps, and he was not sure if it was due to the fact that the physician was a familiar entity or due to the more ungenerous fact that he was probably useless outside the infirmary and therefore posed no immediate threat. Phelps stumbled into view, looking somewhat disheveled and shocked at the sight of Nathaniel, Jack and their muskets. "Good gracious. Were you that afraid of me?"

That would have been stretching things a bit, Nathaniel thought, although it was not a bad interpretation given the evidence. "Wandering a bit far from camp, doctor," he remarked.

"Yes, well I…" He flexed his fingers nervously, apparently unable to articulate the delicacy of his recent activities. He looked like he wanted to walk away, but Jack sidestepped him.

"Sit down. Take a minute for a drink and some civilized company." Jack jerked his head back towards the camp, where their fourteen colonial companions appeared to be enjoying themselves rather loudly. Then he cast another sidelong glance at Nathaniel. "Relatively, anyways. I'm guessing you haven't had much of the latter in the last few months."

Phelps shook his head with a tired smile. "Neither, actually. Their whiskey is terrible."

Jack chuckled and tossed a flask from the inside of his jacket to the doctor, who lowered himself onto a decomposing log across from them. "Are you married, Rupert?" Jack asked.

Phelps blinked. "Yes. Yes, I am," he replied.

"Is she pretty?" Jack persisted.

"Pretty," the physician repeated thoughtfully. "I'm not sure I would say that. Girls are pretty. Ladies are handsome or beautiful or…or some other word," he finished with an uncomfortable blush. He looked rather embarrassed to be the center of attention. Nathaniel, on the other hand, was only too glad that Jack had found someone else to torment.

"All right then," Jack said agreeably. "Handsome. Dark hair, deep brown eyes, makes love with more passion than a Puritan preacher at the final judgment?" He grinned at Nathaniel, who threw a scowl in his direction – a mistake, he remembered too late, as reactions like that generally only encouraged him.

"Red, actually," Phelps said. "Green eyes – Irish green. And the rest is none of your business, Captain Winthrop." The doctor smiled uncertainly, as if he was unaccustomed to making jokes among equals and was not sure how his audience would receive them. He looked relieved when Jack laughed in appreciation.

"Got any children?" Nathaniel asked, less out of curiosity than a desire to get off the topic of wives and supposed fiancées.

"Two boys. One's thirteen, and the other is…well, I'm not sure." Phelps looked down and rubbed the back of his neck. "He was seven when I left. I got a letter from my wife back in September. He came down with the smallpox. If he's still alive, he would be ten now, I suppose." He ran a finger across his forehead. Nathaniel decided to let Jack deal with that conversation damper on his own.

"You never said if she was pretty or not," Jack reminded him.

"Well, she's not," the doctor replied. "She's a skinny, gangly thing with long arms and a freckled nose that crinkles like a kitten when she laughs. She's got eyes green enough to make every papist on the Emerald Isle jealous, except when she's angry, and then they turn every color except green. Watching her move across the kitchen is like – like watching an elf. The kind in the stories she reads to our children. A little sprite that carries sunset and autumn and rosemary everywhere she goes. That is not _pretty_."

"I've never seen her in black, though," he added as an afterthought. "I suppose if- well, she wouldn't look like that anymore, would she?" He seemed to be talking more to himself at this point. Jack did not appear at all perturbed by the morbid turn the conversation had taken. He reached across and clapped Rupert Phelps affably on the shoulder.

"There," he said. "Tell me, Nathaniel. What man who had a girl like that waiting for him would ever look twice at Cora Munro?"

"Get out," Nathaniel said diplomatically, while he still possessed enough self-command to make it sound like a suggestion.

"No, it's all right. I'll go," Phelps said, waving away the hand Jack offered him as he got to his feet. He winced very subtly as he did, making Nathaniel wonder just how old the physician really was. But it was difficult to tell anyone's real age here, he thought with an unexpected flash of bitterness. Phelps shrugged and gave them a self-conscious smile. "After all, no one likes a third wheel." He straightened and started to leave.

"Be careful, Mister Poe," he said over his shoulder. "They hunt down deserters as well as Indians." Nathaniel glanced at Jack as Phelps walked away and shrugged. It only confirmed what he already suspected. It also meant he would have to make Cora talk to him tonight. While he finished piecing his musket together, he tried very hard not to think of all the unpleasant turns that conversation could take.

WINTER WAS WORSE IN THE Americas, Alice decided with a shiver. To be fair, it hadn't exactly been tame in England, and it had been even harsher in Scotland. But it felt sharper and drier here on the edge of the civilized world. The chill on the frontier had a way of sinking into her bones, as though it were inside her as well as outside.

The sky had darkened from cerulean to deep ink blue, which probably meant she had been sitting in the cold for about two hours, although how she knew that when she had not seen anything resembling a pendulum clock in the last four months she was not quite sure. She shivered again and tried to massage some feeling into her chapped hands. Cora would start wondering where she was soon. She may have already started wondering. But Alice did not feel like moving, even though she knew the longer she stayed out here the more likely it was that someone would notice her absence, and the more awkward it would be when she inevitably had to return.

The crackle of frozen grass made her twist around involuntarily. Her face flushed as she recognized the figure standing in the trees several feet behind her. The idea that Uncas had been watching her without her knowledge filled her with more than a little embarrassment. A few early snowflakes clung to his hair and eyelashes, making his brown eyes almost black. The look on his face implied he had not meant for her to see him. "Your sister was worried about you. You should go back before she thinks something happened."

_So you're Cora's messenger now?_ Alice thought. She did not believe that explanation merited an answer. After a few moments of the unspoken stalemate, she heard the crunch of his footsteps coming closer. At first she thought he was going to seize her arm and forcibly return her to camp. But instead Uncas sat down nonchalantly a few feet to her right in his habitual cross-legged posture. It was clear while he thought she _should_ go back, he was not about to make her.

"It's good that your father's physician is with them," he said after a pause.

"Mmmm," Alice replied. There was not much of a response she could make to a statement like that, unless he expected her to make some derogatory remark about the American soldiers who had accompanied him. Uncas undoubtedly held them in just as much contempt as her sister, and the last few hours had forced Alice to concede that the two of them were right. But for the moment she had exhausted her fury and did not feel like venturing further comment. They sat for a few more minutes in silence. Alice thought it might have helped if there were birds or crickets or cicadas so they could at least pretend to listen to something, but the woods were uncooperatively dead. When it became evident that he would not broach the topic of their last conversation on his own, Alice decided to bring it up herself. She swallowed.

"I'm not sorry. That you told me." Uncas did not respond, but the skeptical expression on his face was answer enough. Alice faltered. "Really, I'm not. I'm-" She hesitated. She had been about to say _glad_, but that would have been an egregious lie. "Grateful," she finished. "So I don't want you to think that I'm broken or…" Her voice trailed off. It was glaringly obvious he did not believe her.

"It's all right. It feels…liberating." The word surprised her, but it felt right after she said it. She had wasted ten years pining for an absent father, convinced he was doing something noble in sacrificing himself for king and country. It had not occurred to her that perhaps she was _allowed_ to resent him for it. "I didn't know it was all right to hate him," she said honestly.

"You shouldn't talk like that," Uncas said. Alice glanced up, a bit shocked at the sharpness in his voice.

"Why not? It's true."

Uncas frowned and shrugged. "It bothers me," he replied efficiently, as though that reason alone ought to suffice.

Alice crossed her arms and pulled her knees into her chest. "I have to hate _someone_," she said in a voice that sounded petulant against her ears. Uncas looked away from her. She supposed he found it embarrassing to witness such a juvenile spectacle. Women of her age did not fixate on their fathers. She should have reconciled herself to his absence and looked for another to take his place years ago.

"Forget it, if you can," Uncas said. "Go back to England and remember what he was like there."

The advice sounded well-intentioned, but it sent a surge of anger through her chest. So he thought she could simply return to Portman Square and pick up the pieces of her old life, as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened? And as for remembering her father back in England, Alice did not think she really wanted to. The few times she had seen him in London, he had almost always been in uniform attending a review or a party or – on the rare occasion an English officer condescended to invite him – a formal ball. She did not want and had never wanted to remember her father the soldier. She forced her thoughts further back to their manor in Arlysle. She tried to recall little things he used to do that she enjoyed, such as reading Scottish poetry to her and Cora in front of the fire in their favorite sitting room, or the precise, almost regimental, way he brushed stray specks of powder from his wig off his jacket. But to her frustration, the memories were hazy. She could remember _that_ he had done them, but the important details, the exact expression on his face and the sound of his voice, eluded her.

"I'm afraid to go back," she said quietly.

Uncas turned to look at her again. His expression contained some sorrow and, at least she thought, a trace of pity. "You won't get better out here, little rabbit." He touched her cheek briefly as he spoke. It was an affectionate, patronizing, almost brotherly gesture, but there was something of a farewell in it. Alice looked down, blinking away what she hoped was merely the thawing of frozen snowflakes on her eyelashes.

_But I don't need you to make me "better."_ _And I don't care if you can't make me smile_, she thought. It occurred to her that there was no way to tell him that which would not sound insulting. At times like this Uncas appeared to her more of a boy than a man. He seemed to think she wanted a hero. She did not know how to make him understand that she had had enough of heroes, and right now what she wanted more than anything else was someone to _cry_ with. In the absence of an eloquent response, she settled for a functional one.

"I know." She twisted the hem of her sleeve in her fingers, observing with intellectual disinterest the contrast between the ebony of the chamois and the ivory of her hand. "I'm not going to get better, Uncas."

It was not despair; it was mere fact. It had become clearer to her over the last few weeks that it no longer mattered _where _she went. She had spent the better half of her life drifting from one locale to another. It had been bearable only because of her conviction that it was temporary. But apparently she had been waiting for someone to come back who did not exist. She rolled her thumbs along the fabric, wondering if the Mahican sitting next to her could sense the words were half a confession and half a challenge. _Could you promise more? Or is my fragile spirit too much for you?_

"People don't get better out here," she said fiercely. "They die, or they go mad, or they-"

Uncas reached over and closed his hand around hers. His fingers felt cold and rough, like the limestone cliffs where she once ran barefoot when she was sure no one would be watching. "It's true," he said. "Some people die, and some people go mad."

_And some do both, _she thought_._ But neither category applied to him. Nor was he like his brother, who survived by making himself as hard and callous as the frontier that had bred him. Uncas just slowly became sadder. And it confused her that she craved the sadness in his eyes as much as she yearned to make it disappear. She shifted her hand tentatively in his wrist. He startled her by reaching out with his other hand so both of his were suddenly tracing the inside of hers. Alice found herself wondering what it would be like to watch those hands become wrinkled and leathery. She wanted to know if his voice would sound this deep half a century from now, and if his raven hair would turn silver or white.

"I'm afraid of everyone waiting back there," she said with another shudder. "I'm afraid of all their staring and their questions and-" She paused. Uncas had stopped tracing her palm and had lowered her hand to his knee, folding it into a small fist between his fingers.

"Is that all?" he asked.

_No_, she thought, _I'm afraid of going to a place where I won't see you. I'm afraid that I could go back to Portman Square and be perfectly fine, and your face would fade just like my father's and Duncan's and I would be stupid enough to think I was happy._

"I'm afraid of forgetting you," she said, feeling her cheeks redden. Uncas dropped her hand. Alice retracted her fingers in embarrassment. She supposed it was only natural he would be repulsed by a confession like that. She of all people ought to know that clinging to others only drove them away. Of course Uncas would be disgusted. She had just begun pondering an appropriate follow-up sentence that might redeem her when his fingers swept across the side of her face. Before she had time to react, she felt his lips brush against her forehead.

"Then don't," he said quietly into her hair.

Alice blinked. His fingers slid down to the back of her neck. A little uncertainly, Alice leaned her head into his shoulder while she tried to process all the ways to interpret what he had just said. It was not in the strictest sense an invitation to stay. But she doubted he would ever be able to ask her that directly, any more than she would be able to ask him to let her.

It depressed her to think of how much time they would probably waste searching for words. It depressed her even more to think that there was no place where either of them could be completely happy. Even if they built a house in the deepest part of the wilderness, or on the empty crags of Scotland, somewhere no one would care that he was red and she was white and they could grow old watching the leaves change color and listening to the sounds of summer dying. But the loneliness did not feel so painful next to him. And just once, it felt wonderful to need someone who needed her back.

_Being with you is sad_, she thought. _But being without you is sadder._

Alice leaned further into his arm and experienced an unexpected thrill as he wrapped his other arm around her waist to pull her closer. Or perhaps it was merely relief at not being pushed away. The strange scent of his shirt tickled her nose. Everything about him smelled foreign, of sage and gunpowder and tobacco. Everything except the cold drops of sweat on his chest, which carried traces of waves crashing against a shore she doubted she would ever see again.

* * *

_It depresses me that I couldn't seem to write a legitimate kiss between them. I'm sure they will eventually. But I don't think they're going to tell me about it.  
- bethsaida_


	16. Fidelis

Drifts of smoke from kindling and tobacco stung Cora's eyes, as if to put the finishing touches on an isolation she already found almost unbearable. It wasn't for lack of companions. The ten or eleven American soldiers sitting around the fire were certainly _talkative_ enough, but most of their conversations revolved around reliving war stories or trading inside jokes, to the point where she was only half listening. The people she did care about had all gone elsewhere. Even Alice had managed to disappear, and Cora had delegated the task of finding her to Mr. Phelps, a decision she was starting to regret. It was very easy to feel lonely while also feeling useless.

By the time Mr. Phelps returned, Cora had almost made up her mind to go looking for either or both of them on her own. He crossed the fire and stopped to press a calloused hand on her shoulder. "She's fine," he said in a voice barely audible. Cora nodded and brushed his fingers in response. She was grateful for his trouble and even more grateful that he had not asked her why she had not gone after Alice herself. It was not a question she felt like answering, even to a family friend as old as Mr. Phelps.

In all honesty she doubted Alice would have even welcomed her company. They had never disliked each other. But neither had they ever shared that inseparable bond that two sisters left on their own from an early age were supposed to share. Alice occupied her own world, and she had never offered to make Cora a part of it. For as long as she could remember, Alice had never run to her for comfort and only rarely responded to Cora's efforts to give it. It had become almost routine for Cora to find her staring out their bedroom window for hours after their father left, with her chin on her knees and her arms around her skirts, pensive, dreamy and unreachable. _Was it any wonder to you that I left when you were so cold to me at home?_

Across from her position on the grass, Josiah Ashby smiled graciously and stretched his hands over the fire. "You're a very lucky woman, Miss Munro. Men like Poe are hard to come by." Cora straightened involuntarily. Ashby raised his eyebrows at her reaction. "There aren't many in these parts who haven't heard of him. I doubt you could find a better scout from here to the St. Lawrence," he said, and Cora relaxed. Apparently he had formed his own interpretation for her surprise, and she saw no reason to correct him. "How did you find him?"

"I found him…almost impossible," she returned dryly. Her answer brought a soft chuckle from his throat. Of all fourteen American soldiers, she found him the most difficult to read. He had a loud voice, a louder laugh and a wolfish smile that might have made him ruggedly attractive if it ever reached his eyes. He swore occasionally. But it was not his language that disconcerted her so much as the way he appeared to hide his real thoughts behind a mask of lazy indifference.

"Strange," he said. "You don't strike me as the kind who would prefer to be pampered by one of those housetrained English gentlemen. Meaning no disrespect."

"None taken," Cora responded automatically. "You don't strike me as the kind who would know much about the behavior of English gentlemen."

Ashby acknowledged the insult with another good-natured grin directed at Mr. Phelps. "Is she always this spirited, doctor?"

"You should probably be more worried if she starts acting nice," Mr. Phelps remarked mildly.

"Doctor's right," Nathaniel commented from behind her shoulder, with Jack frowing warily at his right. He sat down next to her with his musket propped casually between his legs and flashed her a half-smile. For a moment it resembled the part charming, part mocking, part secretive smile he reserved only for her. Then he gave her shoulder what she suspected was an intentionally painful squeeze before turning to Ashby. "Fortunately, that doesn't seem to be a problem for either of us."

Ashby pulled a pocket knife from his breeches and began sharpening it idly along a piece of stone. The harsh scraping of steel against flint tore into the curtain of silence around the woods, as though it would slash it to pieces where the noise of conversation and the crackling flames had only nudged it. "Mind if I ask how you ended up playing escort to this brown-eyed little spitfire, Poe?"

"Her fiancé tried to shoot us right after we rescued them from an ambush," Nathaniel replied. "Thought we'd stick around in case we got a chance to return the favor."

A few of the eleven men around the fire snorted. Cora felt her cheeks blush even more fiercely. Nathaniel was enjoying this, she knew, and as the neglected party he probably thought he had a divine right to irritate her. "Duncan Heyward was _not_ my fiancé," she said coolly. A few low whistles followed that response, but beyond that she supposed she might just as well not have said anything at all.

"Guess it's lucky you were in the area," Ashby remarked. "From what I hear, most of those caught in the massacre outside William Henry didn't make it out."

"Not that lucky," Nathaniel said. "Unless you didn't know how much noise a war party makes."

Ashby shrugged and returned his attention to his pocket knife. "We didn't get much news about William Henry back at Edward. Our friend the doctor was one of the few who made it our way. However," he added, "we did pick up a few rumors. Heard Colonel Munro had a bit of trouble with his colonial militia."

"So?" Nathaniel said indifferently. He rotated his musket in his hands, looking bored. Jack stared at Ashby poker-faced.

"Well, I won't say there's not a pretty penny for bringing in deserters," Ashby replied smoothly. "But as soldiers in the service of King George, it's our duty to see every criminal brought to justice."

"Fascinating," said Nathaniel. "But if you're looking for a couple scouts, my friend and I have better things to do."

"I'm sure you do," said Ashby. "That doesn't explain how you and yours happened to be so close to William Henry just when everybody was making to leave. Seems more likely you and your friend were with the party that cut out a few days before it fell."

Jack snorted. "Let me get this straight," he said. "You think we stole out of a fort that was about to get blown to pieces and then up and decided to come back to see how things were going? Or were you thinking we just hung around in the woods for a couple nights to enjoy the view?"

Ashby laughed appreciatively at Jack's logic. He seemed to be enjoying the conversation the way an aristocratic hunter would enjoy chasing down a particularly clever animal he was already sure of catching. "Not a bad point. But the way I figure things, it would be real hard for two-thirds of a militia to get out without help from inside. My gut feeling says you and your friend were part of that, Mister Poe."

Nathaniel rolled his eyes. "Forgive me if I don't feel like being hanged based on your gut feeling," he said dryly.

Ashby smiled amiably. "Fair enough," he said. "We happen to know somebody who saw you there himself. He told us all about you boys less than an hour after you showed up. "

Cora blinked. She glanced at Mr. Phelps, who was sitting across from her with his arms draped over his knees. He raised his head. "I'm sorry, Cora," he said quietly. A lesser man would have looked at her with pleading, but Mr. Phelps evidently knew he had no right to ask for understanding, much less sympathy, and that she was unlikely to give him either one. He glanced at Nathaniel and Jack. "It was nothing personal. I wish it hadn't been you."

"You Judas!" Nathaniel snarled. Mr. Phelps folded his hands across his knees and looked back down. He seemed to accept Nathaniel's assessment of his character. Ashby stretched his hands behind his neck, languorous and cat-like.

"You know I could shoot you before we get within ten miles of Edward," Nathaniel said darkly.

"You could," Ashby conceded. "I wouldn't recommend it." He gave a casual nod to their muskets. Nathaniel scowled before kicking his to the center of the circle. Jack swore under his breath and followed suit. The conversation among their companions turned captors gradually picked up where it had left off, and Cora reflected with irony that anyone who might have stumbled on them by accident would have thought them a party of friends enjoying a brief moment of security in the middle of a hostile wilderness.

A GOOD TRACKER KNEW HOW to measure time. That was one of the first lessons Chingachgook had taught his two sons and one of the most often repeated. Time markers were everywhere: in the leftover ash from a fire, the dung of a wandering buck, or the shifting of the moon over the horizon. Judging by its position now, he and Alice could not have been sitting together more than half an hour. During that half hour, Uncas had rolled over in his mind all the things they should have discussed, none of which they actually had. Most of what they had talked about was forgettable nonsense. And it was difficult to think about anything practical with her head nestled against his shoulder while her gold hair tangled with his black.

He listened to the sound of her breathing and watched the white wisps of vapor escaping her half-parted lips. Although he could not see the top of her face, it looked entirely possible that she had fallen asleep. He shook her arm lightly. When that failed to provoke a response, he ran his fingers below her earlobe and along the side of her neck until the tickling sensation made her stir. "Time to go back," he said, although he had no idea what either of them would say to their relations once they did. She twisted her face away from his shirt.

"Do we have to?" she asked. Uncas toyed with the idea of spending the entire night in the woods. He imagined the astounded looks on Nathaniel and Jack's faces when they returned at sunrise and the disapproving look on Cora's and felt momentarily cowed. It would be entertaining to think of all the things they would assume, most of which would not be true. But he doubted Alice would find it nearly as amusing.

"Come on. Get up." Ignoring her half-hearted protests, he wrapped his arms around her waist and hauled her to her feet. She groaned and stumbled briefly in his arms. Uncas suspected she was faking, but he was not about to call her out on it. It was more fun to play the game by her rules. Once she was reasonably steady on her feet, he began walking back towards camp with one hand holding his musket and the other hand holding hers. The metal felt cold, but her fingers felt colder.

A stirring in the grass ahead of them made him freeze. He pushed back on her wrist to stop her from colliding into him. Common sense would have told him to let go of her and use both hands for operating his musket, but he decided a moment later that would give the approacher too much credit. Whoever was clambering towards them did not appear at all mindful of his surroundings, and if he was trying to move quietly, he was doing a very bad job.

Alice's hand twitched in his. For a second he thought she was going to pull away, but she abruptly checked the reflex and stepped even closer to him than she had been before. She remained planted in that stance with her arm tucked in his elbow, glaring at an agitated Rupert Phelps with childlike stubbornness on her face. Uncas thought the overall effect almost comical. The physician did not look at all surprised. If anything, he looked exasperated.

Alice took a deep breath beside him. She seemed to be bracing herself to say something very important – or at least something she thought very important - when Phelps cut her off.

"Shut up," he advised her. "I don't know what's going on between the two of you, and frankly, I don't care." Alice furrowed her eyebrows quizzically. She did not relax. Phelps turned to Uncas and continued in his state of unsettled abruptness. "Listen closely. Your brother and his friend just got themselves arrested and there's nothing you can do about it. If you're at all intelligent, you'll leave."

_Like you're obviously doing?_ Uncas thought cynically. He decided against voicing the thought aloud. If Phelps was a coward, that was his own business, and he did not feel like getting into an argument with someone Alice might feel inclined to defend. "Leave where?" he asked evenly.

"That's your business," Phelps replied.

Uncas propped his musket on the ground and folded his arms over it. "And if I don't feel like leaving my brother behind?"

"Then you're an idiot," Phelps said. "They're turning your brother and his friend in for money. You they would kill for free."

Beside him, Alice's grip on his shoulder tightened. "Is Cora all right?" she broke in.

"Your sister is…furious, but yes, she is fine. And she'll be even more furious if anything happens to you. Which is why you need to come with me _right now_." He held out his hand to Alice expectantly. Uncas could not help thinking his impatience made him look remarkably like Duncan Heyward. But unlike the English major, Phelps had never struck him as the kind of man who needed to control everything just to soothe his ego. The physician looked genuinely terrified.

Alice shifted her feet and looked at the ground. "There are three of us," she pointed out slowly. "Four, with Cora. We don't have much of a chance, but if they don't know you're helping us-"

"There are not three of us," Phelps corrected her. "There are two of _us_, and one of _him_." He waited a beat for Alice to grasp the implication of what he had said. Alice straightened her shoulders. Phelps drew his hand back a fraction. Apparently it had just occurred to him that he could not take her cooperation for granted.

Alice contemplated the physician with a frown. "Whose side are you on?"

"My family's side," Phelps said brusquely. "A side your father might have thought about taking occasionally."

Alice appeared to consider that. She bit her lip and after a moment of thoughtfulness said, very firmly, "Then I'm sorry, but I can't come with you."

The doctor let his eyes flicker between them. Uncas had a feeling Alice was blushing, but she maintained her position by his side. He gripped her arm, more as a gesture of support than out of any fear she would try to leave. Phelps' wandering eyes finally fixed on Uncas. He crossed his arms. "That girl obviously thinks you're a good person," he said. "I don't."

His posture almost dared Uncas to ask him to elaborate, but his glare made his thoughts clear enough: _If you were halfway decent, you would tell her you despise her right now instead of letting her follow you into some ludicrous plan to rescue your brother. You would leave her in tears and she would hate you for the rest of her life, but at least she would stand a chance at living to see twenty._ Uncas knew that in the doctor's world, and Alice's, a real man would tell her to go whether she wanted to or not. But most people in that world did not see him as a real man, and for once he was grateful for the distinction.

Alice shifted uncomfortably beside him again. "Please tell Cora-" she began, and stopped. "Tell her anything. Or nothing. Or tell her I'm sorry."

Phelps lowered his shoulders. He nodded curtly, as if what she had said made sense, which Uncas supposed it might to him. "Very well," the doctor said. He paused and added, with the air of one who seriously doubted it would make much difference at all, "Good luck."

A CLOUDY, MOONLESS NIGHT WAS a friend to the stalked more than the stalker. That and the dubious element of surprise seemed to be the only two things working in their favor, Uncas thought as he crouched behind a thick tree root jutting out of a thicker trunk. He had chosen their point of defense well: Centuries of aging had swollen the black cypress to a size that would hide two grown men in its shadow– three or four if they had Alice's tiny, waif-like frame.

His legs felt stiff between the frozen air above and the frozen earth below. He shifted position and tried to avoid the crackling mess of fallen leaves and pine needles by his feet. For a dying world the forest felt eerily alive. The silence and the darkness had become creatures in their own right, and tonight they were adversaries. The latter promised to hide them behind a curtain of black velvet; the former would tear it down if they made a single careless move.

He glanced at Alice out of the corner of his eye. She was stretched out on her stomach staring straight ahead into the emptiness. Her fingers were digging into the dirt so tenaciously that her knuckles had turned white. Uncas briefly considered putting a hand on her shoulder and immediately dismissed the idea. Whatever she was doing, it was obviously working, and he did not want to disturb whatever semblance of calm she had managed to achieve. Without intending to, he felt a flash of irritation at Munro. If he had not tried so hard to shelter his youngest daughter and keep her as far away from his world as possible, perhaps the transition would not have scarred her so much. But then she would be a different Alice in a different world. Not _his_ Alice, not the quiet, beautiful, jaded girl lying next to him.

She was not looking at him now, which was probably just as well. He wondered if she was regretting her decision to follow him instead of going back to her sister. He would not have blamed her if she did. If they had days or weeks to prepare instead of minutes, he doubted they could have come up with a riskier rescue plan. But a direct attack would have been reckless and trying to negotiate ridiculous. The only other option that presented itself was to create a diversion and scatter Nathaniel and Jack's fourteen captors until the odds had turned in their favor. Or, he conceded, as little out of their favor as it was possible to get.

Whether she would still want to be around him after tonight seemed like an open question. Either way it was not one he could afford to think about now. Uncas shifted cautiously on the ground, letting his musket slide through his fingers. Alice clapped her hands over her ears. Her body jerked as the crack of powder, lead and steel ripped the night air. A shot in the dark, and then there was nothing to do but wait. Wait to see how many would take the bait, and then run and hide and start over again. He tried to push aside the part of his mind telling him that Phelps was right and trying to rescue his brother was about the most idiotic thing they could do. It was true, but at the moment it was also irrelevant.

He rolled over onto his side to reload. When he turned back, Alice had disappeared. A cursory scan of the foliage found her curled up farther behind the tree with her knees pulled into her chest. She looked more like a turtle than a rabbit, although he had no idea how she had moved so quickly without his noticing. Her entire posture remained rigid and immobile. If not for the tiny clouds of mist that formed occasionally in front of her mouth and nose, he would have been hard-pressed to tell she was breathing. _Dawn_, he promised himself. _If we survive tonight and you want to go back at dawn, I will take you_, and he would. He would take her anywhere she wanted to go. He rolled away from her again, and they continued their vigil in silence.

For the rest of his life he would never remember how long they kept watch. It felt long while it lasted, but when it was over he would remember thinking it had not been long enough. A rustling in the trees, and Uncas counted two figures making their way towards their hiding place. The figures paused, conferred and diverged. One continued straight forward and slightly to the left. Uncas did not care about him. The other turned to the right. He had chosen the correct path, and for that he was most unlucky.

Uncas had a fraction of a second to slice his throat before he had to clap his hand over the man's nose and mouth to stifle the strangling, gurgling noise of his passing. Warm blood trickled down his shirt onto the other arm Uncas had wrapped around his waist. Without looking at Alice, Uncas pulled him closer. He knelt to the ground and rocked the man to his death until he felt his patient go limp in his arms. His knife hovered over the dead man's skull. He hesitated, but only for a moment. He felt a little sick after he scalped the man and thought some of her disgust must be rubbing off on him. It had never bothered him before.

He turned back to pull her to her feet, but she was already standing with her eyes fixed on the blackness beyond the tree. Thinking she would rather not sully her hands with the blood staining his, he brushed past her and trusted she would know enough to follow. He had barely begun to move forward when, without any warning whatsoever, her body slammed into his and she locked her arms around his waist. The side of her face buried itself between his shoulder blades. Uncas stood in an awkward frozen state for a moment, with his arms hovering at an indecisive, half-raised angle at his sides. To a casual observer she would have resembled a rejected mistress clinging to her faithless lover. He might have enjoyed it if her embrace had not been very close to cutting off his air supply.

He lowered his hands in an attempt to disengage himself, but she only held him more tightly. With a painful wrench, she pulled him back into the shadow of the tree, back into darkness and safety.

He followed her eyes and only then noticed the moving silhouette that had made her pull him back. A third man skulked through the woods less than two yards from where they were standing. Uncas allowed his body to relax, but she did not loosen her grip. She clung to him as the bearded shadow passed in front of them and stopped to refill the gunpowder in his musket. For a few tense minutes nothing existed beyond their blind stalker and the feeling of her soft breath against his neck and her fingers digging into his shirt.

The flintstone on the colonial's musket clicked back into place and he resumed his aimless walk, oblivious to their presence a few feet behind him. Uncas barely had time to register his disdain before Alice tugged insistently on his arm. Her feet hardly made a noise against the ground as she pulled him away in the opposite direction. He would have thought her a ghost were it not for the throbbing pressure of her fingers gripping his wrist even more tightly as they wove through the black labyrinth.


	17. Mind Games

_The beginning of chapter 17 overlaps with the end of chapter 16. _

_Warning: Some coarse language ahead_

* * *

The night was cool, the whiskey was migrating generously between hands and Daniel Webb was very close to crying. The lock on his musket had jammed again, probably due to the frost and the fact that he had put the screws in crooked when he had reassembled it the night before, and now he couldn't get them out. It wasn't that he felt he was in any special danger, but it made him feel like even more of a liability than he did most of the time. _Of course if anyone's going to have a jammed musket, it might as well be you_, he conceded. _It's not like you would use it that well when it's in good shape. Better you than someone like Northam or Ashby._

Ashby was the one every one idolized; Ashby had killed more than two dozen Indians by the time he was seventeen. Meanwhile ten years later, seventeen-year-old Daniel had nothing except his name, and even that he had to share with the general of Fort Edward, the man who was supposed to be winning the war for England. An unfortunate coincidence that made being in the fort pure agony.

It wouldn't have been so bad if Webb were an average man. He might even have been able to endure the man being a hero. It was never pleasant to be overshadowed, but it was a feeling Daniel was used to. But no, General Webb was a coward, and most of the men at the fort were of the opinion that one coward named Daniel Webb was more than enough. So he had left with Ashby and Northam and the rest of them, not because he particularly wanted to go shoot the French marquis' savages (although he supposed killing one or two wouldn't hurt), but because he couldn't stand being a bothersome redundancy.

And now, though he was still at a loss on exactly how, they had ended up becoming walking jailers to two deserters. At least he was getting to do something just, Daniel thought. The darker one, Poe, looked dangerous enough. His tangled hair was as long as a woman's. A permanent scowl seemed etched into his hardened face, and he was constantly flexing his fingers as though wishing for a weapon to materialize between them. But his lighter companion didn't look so bad. His face seemed more prone to smiling than Poe's. Winthrop looked like the kind of man who would be able to tell him how to fix his musket without making him feel like an idiot, but Daniel was too afraid to ask.

He didn't know what to do with the money the general had promised for the capture of deserters. He didn't want it, certainly didn't _need _it. He would gladly have given his share to Phelps. The doctor always had a friendly word for him, and he had a son sick with smallpox back in England. Daniel's sister had caught smallpox as a child, so he knew what a burden it could be on a family's income even if the victim lived. And his sister had grown up and married a nearsighted pastor who couldn't see well enough to care that her face was all pox-marked and ugly, so he didn't need the money. Giving it to Phelps, he decided, would be the decent thing to do.

Daniel's finger slipped on the cold lock and came away crimson. He decided to try using the blood to slicken the screw, but his fingers only slid uselessly on the metal. For a wild moment he considered asking Winthrop for help anyway. The man was going to be executed, so it wasn't as though he would live very long to make fun of him for it. _And what would you say? Hullo, sorry I'm getting you hanged, but do you have any advice on loosening musket screws?_

He blinked as the ludicrous scenario faded and with an embarrassed blush realized the direction his eyes had drifted. Winthrop was staring at him, staring stupidly at Winthrop. "There something you want to say to me?" Winthrop asked shortly. He probably hadn't meant to sound curt, but then, if he had, he was certainly entitled.

"I just-" Daniel began, and finished with a stammer. "No. No, I don't." _No, of course not_, he berated himself. _You're just a useless craven. Keep walking, nothing worth looking at here._

NATHANIEL DRAGGED HIS FEET ON the ground and concluded that searching for a meaning in life was, for the most part, a colossal waste of time.

The majority of him did not envy Duncan Heyward his fate. He did not relish the idea of being burned alive, but at least that had accomplished something. Dying like this just felt stupid. For lack of a better occupation, he started to speculate how much his head and Jack's were worth together and whether a fifteenth part of it would be enough to keep a seven-year-old from dying of smallpox. It was not a possibility he was willing to bet his life on. And he knew it was probably a moot point. In all likelihood if the kid wasn't better by now, he was dead. On the other hand, Nathaniel wasn't sure he wouldn't have done the same thing as Phelps if it were the life of _his_ child hanging in the balance. Or Cora's, for that matter.

That aside, it was not the most uncomfortable captivity. There were no bindings on their wrists or musket nozzles prodding their backs every two minutes, though Nathaniel suspected this was more the result of extreme confidence than generosity. It wasn't as if their captors had to make a display of arresting them when they had the force of sheer numbers on their side. He wondered if they would try putting on more of a show once they reached Edward. They didn't seem the type to care about presentation. But they were getting their money from the British, who might be more impressed with two bound prisoners. He rubbed his wrists together and kept walking.

Jack edged closer to him. "We'll have to stop sometime," he muttered.

"Really? Says who?" Nathaniel asked.

"Most of them have been drinking," Jack replied quietly. "Give it an hour. Two, tops. At least half of them will pass out, and the other half will be stuck guarding us and playing nurse. They'll be distracted. Then we can ambush them."

"Were you forgetting that they have our muskets?" Nathaniel pointed out.

"That's our advantage," Jack said in a low but animated voice. "With five to one odds we need surprise and we need quiet. Better to do things the old-fashioned way."

"So we can get killed the new-fashioned way," Nathaniel concluded. Beside him he heard Cora snort softly in derision. The other bright side to their situation seemed to be that, since their arrest, she was being much nicer to him. She had ditched the physician and decided to walk next to him for the duration of the forced march. Neither of them spoke to each other very much, but she had slipped her arm through his elbow. She even looked a little apologetic. He experienced a completely selfish surge of elation when he heard her say, "I'm afraid I agree with Nathaniel, Jack. You're an idiot."

"Right," Jack replied. "I forgot I was talking to the genius who was just going to let himself get hanged."

"It impressed her," Nathaniel said, without bothering to hide a smirk.

"Actually, I thought you were an idiot too," Cora told him, and Nathaniel felt his good mood at her return to his side deflate somewhat. Jack smirked back.

"Honestly, Cora, you should have just married me. Heroes get annoying after a while."

"Yes, they really do, don't they?" she replied.

A crack too high and short to be thunder saved Nathaniel the trouble of formulating a response. The unexpected gunshot prompted a shuffling of feet and fumbling for muskets that left him feeling unpleasantly left out. He settled for digging his fingers into his palms and scanning the trees while their escorts formed a lopsided ring around in them. Just in case the three of them had forgotten how valuable they were, he thought darkly. His own musket was now being ineptly held in position several feet to his right by Phelps. The doctor, it appeared, was expendable.

Ashby left the circle and cantered noiselessly toward them. "On the ground," he said quietly. Cora glared at him, but she was sensible enough to realize that, at least for the moment, a common interest in survival united friend and foe. Looking no less furious, she lowered herself to the ground, and Nathaniel started to follow suit until he realized their current arrangement would have put Cora between himself and Ashby. He sidestepped to the left. Ashby let out an exhale of exasperation and crouched down next to Nathaniel. "Relax, Poe. I'm not interested in your widow."

"That supposed to make me feel better?" Nathaniel asked under his breath.

"Not really," Ashby replied.

Nathaniel slid closer to the ground. He rolled over onto his arm so his back was facing Ashby and the rest of him was facing Cora. Her head was conveniently resting a few inches across from his shoulder. He took advantage of their unexpected delay to let his eyes flicker across her face. He thought with satisfaction that any other woman would have glanced away or tried to avoid his gaze, but not this one. For one perverse moment he wondered what would happen if he kissed her in front of Jack, the doctor and the militiamen and was immediately rewarded with the sight of a slight flush coloring her cheeks.

A black-haired youth Nathaniel had heard the others call Daniel shifted nervously. He was breathing so loudly Nathaniel suspected he was close to hyperventilating. "Easy there, son," the curly-bearded man crouched nearby said in what was probably supposed to come out as a reassuring whisper. "More likely it's just somebody shot a deer out there."

_Nobody shoots deer in the middle of the night, you moron_, Nathaniel thought, and apparently Ashby thought he was a moron too, because he immediately replied, "Think so? Why don't you go have a look and let us know."

It was a sign of courage that the man with the curly beard left without another word. A couple minutes later Ashby rose silently from the center of the circle and nudged two more conscripts with the toe of his boot – the boy Daniel and a man in a dark green coat. They also left without hesitating. Even Daniel seemed to have gotten his overactive lungs under control. Nathaniel grudgingly conceded that their captors were not complete cowards.

Ashby returned to the center. He smiled good-naturedly at them as he lowered himself back onto the grass. "Heard about two dozen of you disappeared right under Munro's nose," he remarked in a low voice. "I'm not much of a scholar, but I'm only counting two of you. Where do you recommend I start looking for the rest?"

"Why don't you go to hell?" Jack suggested.

Ashby smiled again, less good-naturedly. "The devil pays pretty well, Winthrop, but his work's all up here."

Cora folded her arms across her chest and took a fierce interest in the grass a few feet in front of her. She was probably berating herself for choosing to stay by his side instead of looking for her sister. He wondered if she was hoping Ashby's scouts would find Alice or hoping they would _not_ find Alice and reflected that Cora probably wasn't sure herself. Just as he wasn't sure whether he wanted the anonymous shooter to be Uncas or not, he thought. He tapped her elbow. "Hey," he said roughly. "I… know how you feel."

"That's new for you," she said acidly, but she let him put his arm around her. It was almost a pleasant moment until the return of the man in the dark green coat cut it off before either of them could really get comfortable. He whispered something to Ashby that Nathaniel couldn't make out. Whatever it was made Ashby blanch. He turned to survey the three of them the way a horse buyer would survey animals until his critical eyes settled on Nathaniel.

"You," he said finally. "You're with me."

"Does that mean I get a musket?" Nathaniel asked dryly.

"Nice try," Ashby said grimly. "Let's go."

Nathaniel shrugged and got to his feet. He turned back just in time to see Jack usurp his place at Cora's side. "Get your arm off her," Nathaniel said with a scowl.

"Just giving you an incentive to live, mate," Jack replied, without taking his hand off Cora's shoulder. A couple shoves forced him to turn away again, and Nathaniel thought how cruelly ironic it would be if that was the last time he ever saw her. As they made their way deeper into the trees, an ungentle prodding pushed him to the front.

"Mind explaining why I don't get a weapon when I'm going first?" he asked.

Ashby chuckled. "We're working under the assumption they'd prefer you alive, but the warrant didn't specify, so we're really just guessing. Move."

So Nathaniel moved and tried to ignore the seven muskets trained on his back. They moved until the man in the dark green coat stopped them in front of an engorged black cypress. Nothing looked peculiar or out of place, but after standing there for a few seconds he caught the unmistakable scent of blood and death rising from the ground. Nathaniel waited impassively while three of Ashby's men disappeared to investigate.

They hauled out what was left of the youth called Daniel, and it wasn't particularly pretty. Most of him was still intact except for a scarlet smile across his throat and a gap in his head where blood and brains mingled with black hair. Nathaniel cringed slightly at what could very well be his brother's handiwork.

"You fucking bastards," the man on Nathaniel's left spat out. Ashby said nothing, but stared at the corpse straight-faced and deadpan while his complexion grew steadily whiter. After what felt like several long minutes, Ashby looked away from the body and strode toward Nathaniel.

"Kneel," he said softly.

"I'd rather die standing," Nathaniel informed him. In a double impact, the butt of Ashby's musket collided with his forehead and the nozzle rammed into his stomach, momentarily knocking the wind out of him. "Kneel," Ashby repeated in the same soft voice.

The slam of another musket into the back of his legs told him he would go to his knees whether he liked it or not. Nathaniel grinned darkly as he stumbled. "Have it your way, if you're that scared," he muttered. If Ashby was offended, he didn't show it. He circled behind Nathaniel until the more dangerous end of his musket jabbed into his neck. A familiar click awakened in Nathaniel a fear he was ashamed to discover he still had, along with the equally profound realization that he really, really did not want to die.

A high-pitched crack rent the silence. Nathaniel flinched involuntarily, tried to stop his ears from ringing and realized the fact that his ears _were_ ringing meant that he was not dead. He glanced at the thin wisp of smoke rising from the spot on the grass where the bullet had landed.

"That was a message for your so-called brother," Ashby said in a louder voice. "And anyone else hiding out there. If I don't see somebody come through these trees in five minutes, the next one goes in the back of his brain."

_Just as long as you don't shoot anything important_, Nathaniel thought. As if confirming its uselessness, his mind started imagining a future in which he died and Cora was left alone with what remained of his family and hers. He wondered if she would cry over him – not very likely, as she had hardly shed any tears for her father or her sister. More likely she would retreat into a period of silent mourning while throwing herself into whatever task she could find with furious dedication. And then, after a few months, she would start smiling again, and laughing, and eventually someone else would come along who would laugh with her. They would laugh at a cabin they built in the forest in spring, laugh at the leaves that rotted in their well in autumn, and laugh at the ice that covered their threshold and froze them inside in winter. The someone he imagined laughing with her looked a bit like Jack.

A rustling in the trees broke his morbid reverie. "Looks like you're in luck, Poe," Ashby muttered. "Guess your brother cares about you after all."

Nathaniel grimaced. He began preparing a long list of insults to hurl to at his brother that opened with, _You idiot, now you'll never find out if Alice Munro liked you back or not._ Before he could make up his mind what language to start with, the clicking of several muskets reminded him he might not get a chance to use any of them, and suddenly he didn't want to anymore. The rustling grew louder. Nathaniel wondered when his brother had gotten so careless when a voice he had heard only a few times spoke very quickly from the dark. "Wait, please, I promise I'm not dangerous."

Nathaniel sat up straighter. Looking like she had just wandered there by accident, Alice Munro stepped out of the shadows and gazed uncertainly at her surroundings. The long black chamois sleeves that would have hidden someone of his family's race only threw her white skin into sharp relief, making her appear small and vulnerable. Most of the men released their muskets; a couple raised them higher. She looked surprised and a little embarrassed at their reception. "I'm sorry," she said, looking at her feet. "I didn't mean to scare you."

ASHBY STARED AT ALICE AS though he wasn't sure what she was doing there and didn't entirely trust his eyes. Nathaniel couldn't blame him; Alice didn't look like she knew quite what she was doing there herself. She took a few more steps forward. Her green eyes slowly took in the seven armed men, and then him, and widened. "Mister Poe, what's going on? I don't understand-"

Ashby ran his fingers through his hair. "Not to be rude, Miss Munro, but I think you're the one who needs to do the explaining."

Alice's alarmed eyes remained fixed on Nathaniel. "What's happening? Why are they arresting you?"

Ashby cleared his throat, prompting Alice to finally look away from Nathaniel and consider him. He inclined his head. "Why don't you have a seat," he told her. He said it politely enough, but Nathaniel doubted it was a suggestion, and apparently Alice was smart enough to know it wasn't. She lowered herself onto a tree root, looking thoroughly confused. Ashby sat down next to her. The initial bemusement on his face smoothly faded into an expression of genuine concern. "Miss Munro," he began. "You miss your father, don't you?"

Alice fingered the tree bark near her thigh absentmindedly. "Sometimes," she said. "We also had a dog. Cora and I found him when I was five, and Father let us take care of him for a year, but then he went crazy and Father had to shoot him. I miss him sometimes, too. And my mother," she added as an afterthought.

"Your father," Ashby repeated, apparently trying to bring some focus to her unfocused answer. "Do you know why he died?"

"Oh, yes. It's because he turned into a mass murderer," she said, straightening her shoulders with the pleased certainty of a schoolgirl answering a history question.

"No," Ashby said patiently, "that isn't exactly why..."

"Yes it is," Alice insisted. "You told me, remember? We talked about it a few hours ago." She leaned forward to peer anxiously at his face. "Are you feeling all right, Mister Ashby?"

"I think you're missing the point-" he cut in.

"Maybe you should look for rosemary. I've heard it's very good for remembering things you've forgotten," she said helpfully.

"_No_," he said sharply. Alice shrank back, looking despondent that her remedy had been rejected. Ashby cleared his throat again, looking unnerved that his role as interrogator was being usurped.

"It's true there were certain…vindictive elements to his untimely evisceration," Ashby conceded. He was probably either hoping agreeing with her would make her more cooperative or hoping she simply wouldn't understand him. Nathaniel was betting on the latter. "But that's not important. The important thing is that his death could have been prevented. Understand? If certain key factors-" Ashby shot a dark glare at Nathaniel – "had operated differently, you wouldn't be an orphan, Miss Munro."

Alice looked at him quizzically. "Key factors…?"

"Certain people," Ashby clarified.

"Oh!" Alice clapped her hands to her mouth as comprehension dawned. "You're talking about Mister Poe and Captain Winthrop, aren't you? You mean if they hadn't helped everyone escape, perhaps my father could have held off the French, and he wouldn't have had to surrender and there wouldn't have been a massacre at all."

"Yes. That's right," he said, appearing quite relieved that she had finally gotten the point.

"That's just absurd," Alice told him.

Ashby raised his eyebrows. "Is it?"

"Yes. Because of the ticks," she answered.

"Ticks," Ashby repeated.

Alice nodded. "They carry diseases and all sorts of unwholesome things. And the colonials have more of them, because they spend more time in the woods. So really Captain Winthrop and his men were doing my father a favor by leaving, because they were putting his army in a great deal of danger and weren't doing much good to make up for it." She folded her hands and looked down in demure satisfaction. Ashby stared at her in bewilderment, as though he couldn't decide if she was joking or if it was possible she really was that dense.

"Ticks," Ashby repeated again. "Listen, you - do you even know what a tick _looks_ like? No, don't," he added hastily, as it appeared Alice was about to answer that too. He glared at Nathaniel with even more venom, as though it were somehow his fault that the interrogation was spinning out of control.

"I'm sorry," Alice said timidly, looking at her feet again. "I didn't realize it was a rhetorical question. Were most of yours like that?"

"Forget it," Ashby said. He took a deep breath. "Here's a question that is _not_ rhetorical. The redskin who took you out in the woods with him-"

"He didn't take me there," Alice corrected him. "I went there myself."

"Fine. The redskin who kept you out there," Ashby amended. He enunciated his last words with painstaking precision. "Where is he now?"

Alice furrowed her eyebrows in confusion. "I don't know," she replied.

"Well, which way did he go?" Ashby asked.

"I don't know that either," Alice answered.

"Are you blind?" Ashby demanded. "You had to at least see him run off. Wasn't he right there with you?"

Alice stared at him blankly. "No, he wasn't. He was never with me."

Ashby's jaw clenched. Nathaniel could see the whites of his knuckles as he appeared to be resisting the urge to crack them, or crack something else. "You were gone," Ashby said with excruciating slowness. "For more than two hours. If that redskin wasn't…holding you hostage, or doing anything… _untoward_, what were you doing out there?"

Alice looked down. Her cheeks tinged pink. "I got lost," she said meekly.

TO NATHANIEL'S GRIM SATISFACTION, ASHBY appeared to have decided he believed Alice. He also appeared to have given up trying to get her to say anything rational. In fact, their conversation seemed to have frustrated him so thoroughly that he couldn't stand to be around her and had to temporarily retreat into the woods to retrieve whatever sanity she had chased out of him. No one spoke to her or even really looked at her after that. It was rather impressive how quickly most of them had forgotten she was there. But judging by the dreamy, indifferent way she sat braiding her hair next to him, she seemed to have forgotten about them too. It was as though there was an art to making herself invisible that she had spent years perfecting.

"Looks like he's afraid you're a bad influence on him," Nathaniel remarked, more to make conversation than to state anything profound.

"Yes, I must have made him angry," she replied. "I wish he hadn't left, though. He had very funny ideas." She looked almost mournfully at the direction Ashby had disappeared, and then returned to braiding her hair with shrug. "It's all right. You can relax," she added quietly over his shoulder. "You're doing quite well."

"Thanks," Nathaniel said uncertainly. He did not know what she was talking about or what qualified her to critique him on it, but right now it seemed very wise to agree.

"You shouldn't worry if she suddenly changes her mood around you. She's only polite to the ones she doesn't care for," Alice told him. Nathaniel thought that made about as much sense as the colonial militia deserting to save Munro's soldiers from an invasion of insects, but at least he had established that she was talking about her sister. Cora. His future wife. It occurred to him that if he survived, he might have to put up with this sort of behavior for the next fifty years. He wondered if the prospect left him feeling more exhilarated or exasperated and realized he honestly didn't know.

"Your sister's had quite a few suitors, I guess," he ventured. Alice inclined her head and frowned.

"Not that many," she said. "Four or five, perhaps. A year." She said this with complete seriousness, and Nathaniel decided every Munro on the continent was involved in a vast conspiracy to make his life miserable.

"Alice." She looked up. Nathaniel flexed his hands uncomfortably. Subtlety had never been his strong point, and he saw no reason to try and fix that now. "Did my brother ask you to marry him?"

She stopped braiding her hair to consider the question. "Not exactly," she said thoughtfully. "No."

"And did you…" He sincerely hoped he would not have to be blunt about that. The end of the sentence was really none of his business, except for the part where Cora would hold him personally accountable for anything anyone in his family did to her sister.

"No," Alice replied. Nathaniel decided he would just have to take it on faith that she knew what he was talking about.

"So…where is he?"

"I'm not sure. I would assume he's looking for Cora and Captain Winthrop. Although there are still six people guarding them, so he might have to create another distraction to encourage them to break up," she replied. "He wasn't very happy about my coming out here, but I convinced him I'd be just as safe with you. And the plan will probably work better if he's on his own."

"The plan?" Nathaniel echoed.

She fingered her skirt awkwardly. "We were hoping if we could create a diversion, they might split up, and then you might be able to slip away or grab their muskets and fight back," she said in a small voice. "Or something."

"Alice," he said gently, unable to think of any way to spare her feelings without lying, "that may be the worst rescue plan I've ever heard."

"Well, we couldn't exactly walk in and ask them to release you. We all saw how well that turned out last time," she said, and Nathaniel was forced to admit she had a point. One out of three did not exactly qualify him as an expert at saving people. "It was very brave of you," Alice continued politely. "And it almost worked. But in this case it would help if your opponents cared about things like justice."

"So you're saying we'd stand a better chance if fourteen Puritan preachers had arrested us instead," he said.

She pondered this possibility for a moment before answering, "Probably not. You are a dangerous criminal, after all."

Nathaniel grimaced. "Just our luck we fell in with the wrong kind of dangerous criminals."

Alice frowned. She suddenly looked very thoughtful. "Well, perhaps...No, perhaps not. Never mind." She resumed braiding her hair. Nathaniel contemplated her for minute while the more sensible part of his brain tried to warn him against thinking along the same lines as a psychologically disturbed teenage girl. "Northam," he asked abruptly. "How much is Webb offering for us?"

The man in the dark green coat grunted. "What it's to you?"

Nathaniel shrugged. "If a man's gonna die, he's got a right to know how much he's worth."

Sydney Northam grinned, displaying two rows of yellow, tobacco-stained teeth. "One hundred fifty pounds sterling for you, Poe. But I wouldn't tell that to your friend Winthrop – he's only worth a hundred ten."

"Two hundred sixty pounds," Nathaniel concluded. "Divide that by fifteen – no, sorry, fourteen," he amended and enjoyed watching the curious interplay of emotions competing for dominance on his companion's face. "Guess that would come to about…"

"Eighteen pounds, two crowns, one shilling and five pence," Alice answered automatically. She did not appear at all smug about this knowledge, but continued to unwind the strand of hair in her fingers with the same dreamy, indifferent expression on her face.

"That sound a little low to you, Miss Munro?"

Alice left off fiddling with her hair and sighed. "I'm feeling bored now," she announced. "Mister Northam, would you please take me to my sister?"

UNCAS CARRIED A .59-CALIBER MUSKET, like his father and brother. The young black-haired colonial had carried a .65, a longer and heftier model. He had offered the lighter one to Alice before she had abandoned him for Nathaniel, but she had only laughed and asked him what she would do with it and how she would explain where she had gotten it. Both of which were valid points, but it had seemed like the courteous thing to do, even if it was counterproductive. In the typical upside-down nature of his world of late, her weakness had become her greatest strength. Any chance they had of succeeding depended on her convincing their opponents that she was simply too delicate and deluded to pose a serious threat.

_Don't forget how to count_, she had told him very seriously before she rose to her feet and disappeared into the trees. She had spoken with the solemnity of a child too young to realize she was a child, and too young to realize that the advice of a child is seldom heeded. And then, perhaps seeing something unconsciously patronizing in his eyes, she had frowned more deeply and said, _Uncas, you won't, will you? _He could not remember exactly how he had responded, but whatever change she saw in his face must have satisfied her, for she left him a chaste kiss on the cheek before departing.

The small depression where Alice had dragged him a few minutes ago – or was it hours? – had little to hold his interest. The ground was cold and hard and black, much like the trees surrounding it. So while his lighter half deserted him to play a mind game with his brother, Uncas used the time to play a numbers game. He started with the dry crimson flakes on his hand. Three had gone into the forest and two had returned. _One dead_. One dead left thirteen. But the bleary-eyed physician would not help them; he was playing a different numbers game with his family across the sea. _Fourteen._

Seven had led Nathaniel into the woods, and one was forced to withdraw, though probably not permanently. Uncas had watched long enough to ascertain the direction Josiah Ashby had departed. It was neither towards him nor towards Cora and Jack. _Six and seven and one absent._

Crouched beneath the shadow of a swollen oak, Uncas used beeswax to ease the jammed screw out of the dead colonial's weapon and weighed his options. He could go to Alice and his brother and say with honesty that his choice was not selfish. There were only six surrounding them, and Nathaniel was better with a musket than Jack. But Nathaniel was also a better wordsmith, a trade Uncas had never cared to master. His brother and his lover could keep the game of mind going for however long it took him to reach Jack and Cora. And once he got there…a very large part of him wanted to put off finishing that sentence until he got there, but then he remembered the doctor would be there as well, and a memory of their last exchange followed shortly after. _"They're turning your brother and his friend in for money. You they would kill for free."_

Uncas did not want to die tonight. If all five of them were going to escape alive, Jack and Cora would need to start playing the game of mind as well. In order for that to happen, he needed a way to make Jack aware of his presence without anyone else being aware of it. Suddenly he felt a wave of relief rush through his chest and shoulders, for he could think of a thousand ways to do that. And if Cora could slip away, and they could speak…an entire pathway began to take shape in his mind. The air felt lighter and cleaner, and for a few moments Uncas allowed himself to indulge the sensation of being young and invincible.

The dual illusion carried him out of the depression until he passed another swollen cypress and a metallic click echoed softly at his back. "Unlike you, I don't believe in killing in front of women," said the bearded man in the mahogany jacket. "But I'm curious, son. How was your Scottish slut?"

_Three had gone into the forest_, Uncas thought as the kiss of cold steel bit into his shoulder. Three had gone, but only one had returned. The game of numbers had begun in earnest now, and Uncas had forgotten how to count.


	18. Numbers Games

The grass was as soft and cool as lies, and it felt wonderful. The fresh snow caressed the soles of his feet while the rest of the Mahican's body seared and throbbed and burned. Someone shoved him from behind and reminded him to keep walking. The pulsing ache behind his eyes made it difficult to orient himself. His ears were ringing so loudly he was losing track of what the six men around him said, but every one of them stank of tobacco and rage.

"_Think it's fitting? They do say every creature on God's green earth has its mate…True, and only a bitch would roll over for a dog like that…A bitch for a dog…A dog…"_

_Not a dog_, Uncas thought absurdly. _A fox. I am a fox who loves a rabbit. Nothing fitting about that. _He swallowed the coppery taste of blood in his mouth. He could not have said whether seven minutes or seven hours had passed since the bearded man in the mahogany jacket had surprised him in the woods. Enough time to curse himself for a fool and wonder what Nathaniel would have said, or Alice. _She would call you a fool too, but she would smile._ Phelps already had called him one, along with his other dire predictions. _You they would kill for free. _Uncas could only wonder why they hadn't. So far his six captors seemed content at merely causing as much pain as possible.

He stumbled. The ground rose to meet him, blurry and crimson. He caught himself before he fell. Blinking, he brushed a trickle of blood from his left eye – the right, he suspected, was swollen shut. His hand passed over his left temple and came away sticky. _Would Alice smile if she saw you now?_ It was a pleasant fantasy to imagine her cool fingers tracing the fresh scars on his face while she murmured nonsense lyrics to a nonsense song, but he had little reality to compare it to. She might just as easily hide her face in horror.

"Son." A rough hand shook his arm. "Did you hear what I said, son?" Beneath the ringing in his ears, Uncas recognized the voice of his surprise attacker, the man too civilized to kill in front of women. His comrade clapped him affably on the shoulder. The bones inside jostled like a dozen wooden splinters. "You're in luck," he continued. "They're about to let you go."

Uncas closed his eyes briefly but did not give any further response. If the other man thought him that stupid, he did not deserve the effort. There was a game, or a trick, somewhere in his choice of words. "I hope you run fast," said the man in the mahogany jacket, and then Uncas understood. _A dog_, they had called him, and they evidently planned to shoot him like one.

"YOU WALK LIKE A MULE," Northam observed with a grunt. He fingered his musket impatiently while his eyes scanned the trees. Now that the three of them were alone, he was taking more care to keep his voice down. "Aren't you heathens and half-breeds supposed to be fast?"

"Maybe that's my problem. I'm only half heathen," Nathaniel retorted. Unlike Sydney Northam, he didn't feel any pressing need to lower his voice. It wasn't as if attracting attention would make _his _situation any worse. If Uncas wanted to rescue them right now, he wouldn't have any objection. Somewhere in the next five minutes wouldn't have been too bad either.

"That's funny," said Alice. "The stain on that tree looks like a seahorse." Nathaniel was starting to suspect it might be best to ignore these kinds of remarks. She did not seem to care either way, and she appeared perfectly capable of supplying her own responses. She peered at it more closely and frowned. "Only the snout's too long. And it's brown…the ones in picture books were always blue or purple. No, I suppose it's nothing like a seahorse at all." She resumed her aimless walk, looking no more downcast for the end of her fancy. Nathaniel resumed thinking about his brother. _Any time you feel like, naugheesum…_

But they completed the march in silence, and Uncas remained conspicuously absent. Nathaniel thought this made his brother either very stupid or very, very smart. Considering the behavior of the girl who was his not-exactly fiancée, the former seemed increasingly probable. Anyone who looked at Alice now would have doubted she was even aware they were in danger. Unlike his father, Nathaniel had never taken for granted that Uncas would choose a Delaware-speaking woman, but he had at least assumed he would choose a sane one.

When they were about fifty paces from their destination, Nathaniel began to make out the figures waiting for them. Cora and Jack sat together in quiet tension. They were not speaking – and, more importantly, they were not _touching_ - though Jack was a bit closer to her than he would have preferred. Both faces lit up at their arrival. Cora immediately sprang to her feet and started forward; Jack tactfully remained seated. Cora's face looked gaunt but relieved as she made her way across the grass towards her sister. Alice took in the reunion with admirable, if slightly unnerving, composure. "Hello, Cora," she said brightly.

Cora gave her sister a quick, tight-lipped embrace before turning to Nathaniel. "We heard another gunshot-"

"Decoy," he explained. He didn't feel entirely qualified to delve into the details. He considered telling her to ask her sister, as Alice probably knew the finer points of action to reaction best, but he didn't think there was any reliable way to predict what would come out of her mouth. For this one instance he opted to hold his peace. Cora wrapped an arm around her sister and led her to the center of the circle, where Jack greeted him with a wry smile.

"You made it back after all," he observed.

"Glad to see me?" Nathaniel asked skeptically.

Jack looked at him ingenuously. "'Course I am. The only thing more annoying than a hero is a martyr."

"You're alone," Phelps noted. He was looking at Alice. Alice glanced up at the doctor, who sat on an uplifted tree root with Nathaniel's musket propped up against his knees. It suddenly dawned on Nathaniel that regardless of what she had said a few minutes ago in front of Northam, the doctor knew full well that Uncas had been with her during her absence. It was impossible to tell if the physician was pleased or displeased that she had returned without him. Alice colored as she met his gaze, but set her jaw resolutely and let the comment pass unanswered.

"Enough chatter," Northam said curtly. "We're heading out. Get up." He nudged Jack impatiently with his foot. Jack favored him with an apathetic shrug.

"Thought there were fourteen of you," he pointed out indifferently.

"Got a situation to take care of," Northam said with another grunt. "New orders. Not that I'd expect that to mean much to you, Winthrop."

"Orders?" Jack repeated blandly. "Whose?"

Northam's right eye twitched. "Ashby's," he said. This was news to Nathaniel, who couldn't remember Ashby saying anything of the sort. But as Northam had a weapon and he did not, prudence dictated that he defer to the other man's superior intelligence. He wondered if Alice would contradict him, but she did not show any inclination of resuming her earlier chattiness. Northam glanced pointedly at Nathaniel. "Poe. Tell your friend to get moving."

"Get moving, Winthrop," Nathaniel said experimentally.

Jack glanced up at him from his reclining posture through half-closed eyes. "Or what? Going to shoot me, Nathaniel?" He stretched his arms behind his faded tricornered hat. "I'm comfortable here," he announced. Nathaniel looked apologetically at Northam, who appeared to be realizing that his powers of persuasion were somewhat lacking. Threatening to shoot two criminals about to be hanged would not be particularly effective. His only real leverage was Cora and Alice, but Nathaniel was hoping that thought did not occur to him for a long time.

Nathaniel later reflected that if Northam had paid rather less attention to his prisoners and rather more attention to his surroundings, the events that followed might have turned out very differently. As it was, he did not hear Josiah Ashby approach, and the younger, fairer militiaman could have reached down and strangled Jack in the dark before Northam noticed him. "In a bit of a hurry, aren't you?" Ashby remarked.

Northam colored. The premature return of the man in whose name he had been acting clearly had not factored into his plans. Ashby's good-natured smile had returned, along with his confidence – apparently he had found both in the forest after Alice's brief flirtation with nonsense had chased them away. Northam regained his composure quickly, which Nathaniel supposed was in its own way admirable. He could not say the same for what followed. Northam shouldered his musket and pointed it at Ashby's unprotected chest. "We've got enough here. You'd do better to walk away," he said evenly.

Ashby stared. "What the hell is this?"

"Put that down. You'll get someone killed, you imbecile," said Phelps. Northam ignored the physician and raised his musket a hairsbreadth higher so it pointed at Ashby's forehead. "You heard me. We've got enough here without you," he repeated.

Ashby eyed him coldly. "Meaning what?"

"Meaning as far as I can figure, two hundred sixty divided by seven is a bit more than two hundred sixty divided by eight," Northam said in a clipped voice.

"Four and a half pounds more," Alice supplied without prompting. She was sitting across from Cora and had taken a vague interest in plucking the small prickly burrs off her skirt. She did not look up from her task and did not really appear to be listening to the conversation going on around her. Aside from the mathematics of it, she seemed to consider the whole exchange beneath her interest.

"Wonderful sister-in-law you've got, Poe," Ashby snorted. He turned back to Northam. "You'd seriously kill me for four and a half pounds?"

Northam shrugged. "I've killed men for less."

"Savages and Frenchmen don't count," Ashby returned. "But I'd be curious to hear how you're going to explain this to Webb when you get back."

"Guess that depends on you," Northam replied. "Got no interest in killing you, but I'd take a loss with you along. A two hundred sixty pound bounty splits more nicely without you."

"You don't have to kill him," Jack pointed out. "A couple bullets to the kneecaps would work just as well."

"Don't feel like wasting the ammunition," Northam said practically. "And I don't feel like having you for an enemy, Ashby. That's a compliment, by the way," he added in a more conciliatory tone.

"Good God," said Ashby. "You're crazier than the nutcase little sister."

Northam flashed his golden, tobacco-stained grin. "But you're not. This one shouldn't be too hard for you to figure out. What good's a reward if yo-"

The shot rang out so suddenly, for a minute Nathaniel thought Northam's musket had gone off by accident. But when the third bullet of the night found its mark, it was Sydney Northam who fell face down on the grass and Josiah Ashby who stood unconcernedly over his prone figure. Nathaniel gazed blankly around the circle until his eyes fell on the only other person standing: the mild-mannered physician, his spectacles askew and Nathaniel's musket balanced carefully between his fingers. A few tendrils of smoke twisted seductively from its metal mouth. Ashby's blue eyes flicked to Phelps and then returned to his fallen comrade.

"Thanks, Rupert," he said as he kicked Northam's body onto its back, where it sprawled across the frozen ground and gazed at the canopy with surprise.

"Don't bother," Phelps said curtly. "I'd have let him kill you if I didn't think someone more idiotic would take your place. But thanks to that, they'll know we're still here."

"Don't worry, doctor," Ashby said with a dark chuckle. "If our shooting had attracted any of the heathen folk, we'd already be dead."

"I'm talking about your other men, you moron," Phelps snapped. "And you'd better hope they haven't finished figuring it out yet." Ashby looked at Phelps blankly for a minute. His eyes widened slightly, almost imperceptibly, but long enough for something that resembled fear to pass briefly across his face.

"The math, Mister Ashby," Phelps said coldly. "They're doing the math."

A TENSE SILENCE SMOTHERED WHATEVER remained of their journey. Ashby had slightly more success than Northam in obtaining Jack's cooperation. Unlike his late predecessor, Ashby knew exactly what his leverage was. A sidelong glance at Cora, and Jack and Nathaniel both marched without complaint. But there was no regaining the easy, confident swagger their captors had walked with earlier. It was hard for Nathaniel to say which had shaken them more: the doctor's bullet or his words. It seemed most of the militia could do the math, if not with Alice's uncanny precision, at least well enough to set their nerves on edge. _Seven men here and six out there_, he thought. _And what's two hundred sixty divided by six? Five? _

Feigning fatigue, Cora slipped her arm inside his elbow. "Nathaniel, what have you done?" she whispered urgently.

"Nothing," he answered honestly. _Nothing they couldn't do for themselves_, he amended.

"Nathaniel, please," said Cora. "You don't seriously believe Mister Phelps is right."

Nathaniel shrugged. The truth was it didn't really matter whether the six men left behind were plotting to ambush them to get a larger slice of the bounty on their heads. After what had happened to Northam, an unspoken paranoia had infected the group. Ashby and the others _believed _it was possible, and that was enough. And they weren't just suspicious of the men in the woods, he realized. They were suspicious of each other. Every man was clutching his musket and eyeing the trees nervously, exactly as Northam had a few minutes earlier, except occasionally their eyes would drift to one of their comrades, and then they would quickly look away if they chanced to make eye contact. _They're all afraid_, he thought. _They're afraid any one of them will suddenly decide the group has one too many._ After all, what was two hundred sixty divided by six, or five, or four? The exact figure didn't matter, because to a band of mercenaries, the answer would always be the same, he thought as Cora shifted her grip in his arm. It would always be _more_.

ALICE FELT HER FEET FLOATING on the grass, and she wondered if she dared to let them dance. After all, no one seemed to expect her to behave rationally. Occasionally she felt a pair of wandering eyes drift in her direction, or sometimes several, but a single glance from her was enough to make them nervously avert their gaze, as though lunacy were contagious. The oddness of it sent goose bumps trickling down her spine. Never before had Alice possessed the power to make men nervous. If she had known how liberating going insane could feel, perhaps she would have tried it sooner.

_And I am not afraid_, she thought triumphantly. Everyone around her was older and cleverer than she was, but behind their iron masks she could feel the tension rising from their bodies like steam. They were terrified, all of them - Nathaniel, Cora, Ashby. And she felt nothing, except a strange giddiness that carried her over the ground with thoughts of rosemary and seahorses and sums.

From behind, Cora took hold of her arm and gave it a light squeeze. "Stay close to me," she said softly. The calmness of her voice belied the tightness of her fingers. Like the rest of them, Cora was bracing herself for something, though no one seemed to know quite what.

"It's all right. I'm here," Alice replied, though she wondered for a moment if the words were true. Certainly she was aware of what was going on around them. Barely an hour ago, she had watched her dark-eyed fiancé cut a man's throat and rip open his brain. Surely _that _must have made some impression on her. But though she knew what was happening, she could not bring herself to _feel_ it. All the parts of her that used to be afraid had locked themselves in a distant corner of her brain to do arithmetic. _They would do well to stay there_, she thought.

She tilted her head at the sound of crunching grass. "Do you hear that, Cora?"

"I do," Cora answered quietly. They continued to walk arm in arm without speaking. It would have been very easy to pretend they were walking in Cavendish Square, peering in shop windows for Christmas presents, Alice thought, though when she pondered it further, she could not remember doing any such thing with Cora. Cora always had somewhere else to go. It had usually been one of her aunts or cousins who had taken her shopping for the holidays. She decided to dismiss the small inconsistency. It would have been a nice memory, and she saw no harm in imagining it now. Though if Cora had been content to stay in England and take her shopping, perhaps Alice would never have tried to leave. That thought did frighten her. She pressed closer to Cora and kept walking.

Behind them, the crunching footsteps persisted. Not the careful, quiet kind their people were making. These were heavier and faster, and it sounded as though one of them was stumbling. Cora squeezed her arm more tightly. It was starting to feel painful. Alice bit her lip and searched for something to distract herself. "Aren't you…aren't you going to ask me where I was?" she ventured.

"No," Cora said tersely. Alice recognized that no. It was the _no_ that in the past always meant, _No, but I certainly will ask you about it later_, or, even worse, _No, but I will make sure Father does when he gets back_. "Alice."

Alice looked up. Cora had closed her eyes.

"You don't need to answer to me," Cora said slowly. "To be honest, I'm not that surprised. He is...he is a good man," she finished. A small smile was playing across her sister's lips. "And Alice, you can be an absolute goose sometimes." A small fraction of the tension hovering between them evaporated. It suddenly made Alice want to throw her arms around her and laugh, but in an odd way it made her want to cry as well. Cora had always been her protector and teacher, but now she was relinquishing those roles. Alice felt she had lost an older sister but had not yet gained a friend.

"You were his favorite, you know," Cora told her. Alice did not need to ask whom her sister was referring to, but the comment surprised her.

"I always thought he favored you," she admitted. "He took you with him."

Cora sighed. "Father took me to Vienna and Boston because I begged him to. But he always regretted it." A wry smile crossed her lips, as though she was re-opening a painful wound. "He used to say he had done me a great wrong. He thought by leaving you in London he could...correct the errors he had made with me."

"I think he did better with you," Alice said honestly, but that did not entirely make things right._ I always thought I had it worse, being the abandoned one_, she thought. _What would it have been like to be with him every day but always treated like a mistake?_

The crackling footsteps grew louder. Cora tensed again. She bent her head closer so Alice could feel her warm breath against her ear. "Alice, you must promise to stay next to me," she whispered. "No matter what happens. Do you understand?"

Her sister's grip was suddenly very painful. "Cora, you're hurting me."

"Promise," Cora insisted. She could not raise her voice, but the intensity in her voice was startling. Cora closed her eyes and relaxed her grip. "Please, Alice."

"I promise," Alice answered. Her sister gave her hand a gentler squeeze. Nathaniel appeared soundlessly behind them. He grabbed both of their shoulders in a grip even tighter than her sister's. "They're stopping," he said in a low voice. "Things might get noisy soon."

Alice glanced over her shoulder. Their companions were gradually falling back behind them, in the direction of the crackling steps. When Alice peered further into the darkness, she could faintly make out Ashby's silhouette, his black, lanky arms cradling his musket, listening to the footfalls of imagined foes. _The other six_, she thought. _He's afraid the other six will ambush them._ It did not surprise her. After all, it was only a matter of time. _It's been brewing inside them for a while now_. "Like tea," she said pensively.

Ashby's figure abruptly shrank and disappeared. The other colonials followed his example and crouched to the ground. Alice stumbled as Nathaniel shoved both her and Cora onto the grass. "Get ready to run," he whispered fiercely into their necks. Alice bit her lip and tried to ignore the ache in her shoulder where his fingers dug into it. Captain Winthrop slid down beside her, his coarse shirtsleeve brushing against her wrist.

"Evening," he said pleasantly.

"Good evening," she replied, because she saw no reason not to. "You're not mad too, are you?"

He frowned. "Don't think so," he said after a pause, as if the question deserved serious consideration. "Can't say I'd know if I was, though." A sensible reply. _You're not mad,_ she decided. _But you're not like any of the four of us, either. You haven't forgotten how to laugh. _Someday she would have to ask him why.

"Nathaniel." Cora raised her head slightly from the ground. "They've stopped."

For a moment, it seemed to Alice the entire world had stopped. Somewhere in the distance, a light scuffling echoed beneath the trees. Two gunshots shattered the silence. Alice could never have said where they had come from or which side had fired first, but she would remember the wordless voice – too short to be a cry, barely more than a high grunt, and the sound of someone falling to the ground.

"Go," Winthrop hissed into her ear. Without waiting for permission, he grabbed her elbow and dragged her to her knees. In an awkward, half-walking, half-crawling motion, they scrambled away from the skirmish. Winthrop wrapped his arm tightly around her waist. A day ago – or even a few hours ago – the close personal contact would have made her blush. But there was nothing romantic in the efficient way he maintained his grip, or the professional way his eyes surveyed the ground in front of them. Alice risked a glance to her right and saw Nathaniel dragging Cora by the arm up the hillside, their faces grim and determined. _I doubt even Cora and Nathaniel are thinking about romance now._

When they paused to rest about halfway up the hill, Winthrop released her. In a gesture she did not fully understand, he placed a hand on her shoulder and looked smugly at Nathaniel. "Satisfied?" he asked.

"Shut up," Nathaniel said darkly. He glanced down the hill. Alice was surprised at how harmless their former captors looked from this vantage point, scurrying like dung beetles in the dark. Nathaniel looked away. "Will he be able to find us here?"

The question lingered in the air. Alice turned back and only then realized Nathaniel was staring at her, as though he expected her to have the answer. Without thinking, she nodded. Nathaniel's blue eyes pierced hers for several long seconds, and then he curtly nodded back. _He trusts me_, she thought with surprise. _He doesn't understand me, and a part of him doesn't want to, but right now he thinks my word is enough._ A very odd feeling, to gain the respect of a woodsman who so vastly outranked her in this world, even on a matter so trivial.

"Well," said Winthrop, massaging his thighs. "That's the best news I've heard all day."

They sat under the cover of the trees to wait. Every now and then Cora stood up, paced and sat down again. Alice sympathized; her older sister had never liked to remain still. Nathaniel apparently could do it for hours, though she suspected this was the product of years of training rather than his natural disposition. Alice closed her eyes and tried counting heartbeats. Three hundred beats every five minutes. It seemed like a reasonable way to keep track of time, until she remembered that only a calm heart would beat that slowly, and she did not feel calm. The uselessness of it depressed her, so she gave up.

More time passed. Alice began to grow impatient. _Why doesn't he come?_ He had no right to keep her waiting like this. He was supposed to be watching her; he was supposed to find her. _He promised to_…But in a darker corner of her mind, a sliver of doubt seeped into her thoughts. _Did he promise to remain by your side for a thousand years? Did he promise to love you until your skin withers and cracks and your hair falls out of your head? Did he promise to _die_ for you?_ No, in all honesty they had exchanged no such promises. They had simply reached an agreement, or an understanding, that they would rather be together than apart. Such words were not binding. They were both free creatures, free to do or not do whatever they wished.

Alice stood abruptly. "I forgot something," she said.

Cora groaned softly, still staring at the trees ahead. "What is it, darling?" By then Alice had already slipped away.

_I forgot what I promised him_, she thought as she ran down the hillside. Her feet tripped over roots and thorns and brambles, and she would have worried about being heard were there not already so much noise around her. _I'm sorry, Cora, but I promised him first. Even if I never said it aloud._

It was not necessarily a matter of would or would not, she reminded herself. Perhaps Uncas had not appeared because he _could_ not. There had been another time when he would have found her but could not. She had never asked why he had bothered to chase after her that scorching summer evening. She suspected he might not have known the answer either, but if it was anything like what she was feeling now, it was a combination of terror and nausea and an overwhelming conviction that regardless of what lay ahead, what waited for her if she stayed put was infinitely worse. _I will find you_, she told herself fiercely. _Even if you're hurt, or dead, or you've changed your mind. I will find you just the same._

Her right foot stumbled over a bloated tree root. Her palms stung as they hit the frozen ground, and a cry threatened to break past her cracked lips. Gritting her teeth stubbornly, she scrambled to her feet and searched the crossfire below, but in the dark she could make out only smoke and shadows.

UNCAS LAY FROZEN, FACE PLASTERED against the grass, without remembering exactly how he had gotten there. The screeching symphony of muskets and bullets made it nearly impossible to think. _Run_, they had said. _See the savage run_. But he was not a trained animal to perform for their amusement. The man in the mahogany jacket seemed to think a warning shot near his foot might be enough to scare him into obedience. _Fool_, Uncas thought. _The grandchildren of the Lenape do not jump at small noises._ The poor civilized bastard had never expected anyone to fire back. One small shot, and all hell had broken loose.

He raised his head cautiously. Something soft and heavy had fallen across his back, while something warm and wet trickled down his shoulder. Uncas had no idea how or why the new shooting match had started, but it was obvious their target was no longer him. That did not change the fact that he was now trapped in the middle of the crossfire. He raised his head a bit higher. Getting away would mean disentangling himself from the legs, arms and torso weighing him down, but at the moment that was also his greatest protection. Saved by a dead man…the irony would have amused Nathaniel or Jack.

Thick smoke from a dozen muskets was starting to blur his vision. Eyes watering, he scanned the tree line while the clouds of smoke grew denser. A few more minutes, and he might be able to slip through unnoticed. Either he would find Nathaniel and Alice on the other side or he would get shot like a dog after all. _Alice_…he had promised to watch over her. It had been the last thing he had promised her before she slipped away to find his brother. He had promised her many other things as well, secret, unspoken promises he would never be able to keep. But she was no stranger to disappointment, and he had disappointed her more than once already. He took dubious comfort in knowing that if his legacy was not particularly good, at least it was consistent.

He buried his face in the ground again, inhaling the clean, crisp scent of frozen grass. If he could be patient for just a little longer, the smoke and shadows might give him enough cover. But when he raised his eyes again, he was certain the shadows were playing tricks on him. He imagined he saw a petite figure weaving aimlessly through the trees like a forest sprite out of the white man's legends, a sprite of black and white and gold. _No_, he thought, because he could not believe she had so completely lost her mind.

He started to rise. Winter green eyes fell on him, and her face lit up with the radiance of a hundred half-forgotten moons.

"Found you," she announced brightly, as though they were children in a game and the cracks and whistles around them no more than a dozen schoolboys playing at war. Without thinking, he sprinted towards her and shoved her to the ground. Her eyes sparkled with a surprise and delight he found thoroughly disconcerting. _Is this how the world looks to you now?_ he wondered. _Is life only a shadow play for you?_ But whether their situation was reality or fancy in her half-shattered mind, she had evidently decided that he was _hers_, and he was the one object she was not willing to give up. Deciding that would have to do for the moment, he placed his hands on her waist and rolled over so they both lay flat on their stomachs. From that perspective they could absorb the full chaos of their surroundings. Her lips parted in a slight O that mirrored the shape of her eyes. _No, it's not a game,_ he realized. _Somewhere behind those dream-filled irises she knows either of us could die down here_. The thought did not comfort him. He removed the protective arm he had thrown across her back and squeezed her shoulder.

"Walk with me," he said quietly into her ear. "Keep your eyes on the ground." She looked at him, blankly at first, then blinked and nodded. They inched forward, fingers and toes and knees biting into the frost while the frost bit back. Alice pressed her lips together in a thin line of determination. With a conscious effort, Uncas forced his world to contract until it contained nothing but her and the next tree root, or the next patch of shadow, or the next clump of frozen dirt. After a few paces his hand left her arm to grasp her fingers. Hers tightened against his in a grip he suspected would have been painful if either of them had the time or energy to think about it. He thought he ought to say something encouraging. "Keep moving. You're doing fine," he told her, and he almost believed it.

Without a musket, he felt rather naked. It was a stupid concern, he knew. A musket wouldn't protect either of them at a time like this, but he hadn't been without one in years. There was no help for it. If a stray bullet was going to kill them, there was nothing he could do about it. He couldn't help thinking that after all the effort Webb's militiamen had put into to killing them deliberately, he would hate to die by accident.

A step, and another step, and another. The ground began to slope upwards. Sensing the first trappings of safety, he relaxed his grip on her wrist. Slowly, they straightened and stood. He started to pull her to the right, but she tugged insistently on his wrist. "Not that way," she said quietly and pulled him to the left.

For the second time that night, he let her lead him through the darkness. They wove together through the looming forest, no longer a danger but a shelter from the danger they had left behind. Her hand squeezed his wrist again. Through the trees he could just barely make out the black silhouette of his brother waiting for them.

"THAT'S CLOSE ENOUGH," NATHANIEL SAID. Jack slid silently to a stop beside him. Crouched behind two trees about a quarter of the way up the hill, they could scan the crossfire from a position of relative safety. Theoretically it was possible for a stray bullet or two to reach them here, but it wasn't likely.

Jack looked at him blankly. "What, you aren't planning to run in there after her?"

Nathaniel fingered his musket. The thought had occurred to him. He shook his head. "Too soon," he said grimly. "No point if we don't know exactly where they are." He shifted uncomfortably. It was true, but the words sounded discordant as soon as they left his mouth. It was utterly insensible, what she had done. He could not be expected to emulate the heroics of a suicidal teenage girl. It was…unfair. She had no right to run after his brother like that, as though she could possibly care more. And they had no idea if Uncas was even in danger. It was irrational, idiotic, insane, and it put him to shame. It put him to shame that a scarred child like Alice would risk more for his brother than he would.

"There," said Jack, peering cautiously around the tree. Nathaniel followed the direction of his friend's finger. Through the smoke, he could faintly make out two figures slowly inching their way forward on the ground.

Nathaniel groaned. "Looks like I'm going in after all," he said.

Jack grinned wryly at him. "Well, that's a relief," he said. "For a second earlier there, you almost sounded intellige-" A spray of red burst out of his auburn hair as his head rolled onto his shoulder. He leaned against the swollen trunk and stared glassy-eyed at Nathaniel, the last syllable of an unfinished jest still lingering on his half-parted lips.

* * *

Time and distance erase almost everything, Alice thought as they trudged across the frozen earth. She did not know how long they had been walking, but already the shouts of men and muskets had faded so much they could be mistaken for distant thunder, or a light whistling wind. Time and distance were enough to erase sound and memories and tenderness. _A father's conscience._

Mr. Phelps meandered a few paces to their right. He looked rather lost. Ahead of them, Nathaniel and Cora had slung Captain Winthrop's arms over their shoulders. She wondered when he had been hurt, and how soon he would wake up. _I still need to ask you why you can laugh._

"Mister Phelps?" she said softly. "What time is it?"

The doctor turned to regard her slowly, as though surprised that she had addressed him. He did not appear to have understood the question. "What time is it?" she repeated.

He blinked, like a man waking from a long dream not quite at home in reality. His hand migrated even more slowly into his pocket and removed a small brass disk. "A quarter past nine," he answered mechanically. He turned away and continued walking as though they had never spoken.

The knowledge depressed her. This night, which already felt like the longest she could remember, was not even halfway spent. Barely four hours hung between them and sunset that evening. Four hours that to her mind felt like a lifetime. _Four hours ago I believed my father a war hero_, she thought, and wondered just how many lifetimes she had lived in eighteen years. But she did not have the energy to sort it all out right now. Her side cramped, and she wished for the nights when her father would carry her up the stairs to her bedchamber when she was too drowsy to climb them. She could not afford such a fantasy now when Uncas was leaning on her. "How much farther do you think we will walk tonight?"

Uncas chuckled softly. "A ways," he told her. Alice sighed and accepted the vagueness of the reply as bleakly appropriate. _No end until we die,_ she thought. _Only ways and more ways_.


	19. Valediction

_It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory. –W. Edwards Deming_

* * *

The physician left in the coldest hour before dawn. Alice had not meant to be awake. Once Nathaniel finally let them stop, she had fully intended to collapse on the ground just as she had collapsed the night after the assault on the George Road four months earlier.

The air had been stickier then, heavy with the odors of earth and sweat and gunpowder. Duncan had laid a blanket for her on the grass and given her his jacket for a pillow. But tonight Nathaniel had led them into a cave. There was no grass, and she had only her hands and arms to cushion her head. Those she decided to stuff into the sleeves of her chamois shirt to keep warm. Then Alice had shut her eyes and waited for a sweet black vacuum to sweep her away, but it did not come. Instead she listened to Cora and Nathaniel talking late into the night. Mister Phelps' name appeared frequently in the conversation. So did Captain Winthrop, whom they talked about as though he were no longer there.

After a time Cora lay down beside her. Her sister wrapped her arms around her waist, exactly as she had when they were bed companions of nine and five. For a few moments Alice thought it would be nice to pretend they were girls of nine and five, not twenty-two and eighteen, but soon the embrace felt smothering. She waited for her sister's breathing to slow into the soft, steady rhythm of sleep. Then she delicately removed her sister's arms and crept away. Alice spent the rest of the night contemplating a small crack in the ceiling and listening to the sounds of water trickling somewhere far away.

She sat up when she heard the doctor's footsteps creeping towards the entrance. As soon as she reached the mouth of the cave, the cold, crisp air pierced her face like a thousand silver needles. _Everyone needs pain_, she thought. _Pain is the only way we can be sure we're alive_. It seemed she had heard those words before. Perhaps from her father. It sounded like something he would say, though not something he would say to her. Perhaps Temakwe had told her during one of the humid mornings they had spent during the summer peeling bark off the eastern trees. If the herbalist had said it, she doubted she would have listened very closely. It would not have been something she would have wanted to hear, back then.

The sky glistened a deep, rich cobalt. Outside a hundred stars winked at her like diamonds in velvet. As she stepped outside, her foot stumbled against something hard and metallic. She glanced down at Nathaniel's musket, which had been propped against the cave wall before she had knocked it to the ground. Mr. Phelps turned at the soft thud. "I thought your sister's fiancé would be wanting that back," he said by way of explanation. He stood with his hands crossed behind him, pondering the canopy as she had. After a while he spoke again. "I don't expect you to forgive me."

There were a hundred things she could have said in response, and she did not feel like saying any of them. That she did not think she forgave him and doubted anyone in her family would was a fact, but it seemed irrelevant. And she did not really want to fixate on questions like forgiving or not forgiving. It was too exhausting. She settled for a simpler reply. "You should go before Cora wakes up." Like all of them, Cora had been too tired to question his presence with them last night, but a Cora well-rested and furious would be another matter entirely. Mr. Phelps nodded.

"When did you start talking like that again?" he asked. Alice blinked. He clarified. "Your voice. Your…accent."

"Oh," she replied. "I don't know. It just happened. He-" Her face began to flush, which usually happened whenever she caught herself inadvertently slipping into a Scottish brogue. "He told me he likes it," she said in a smaller voice.

Mr. Phelps frowned. She wondered if he was about to lecture her on the rashness of her affections. But after a long stretch he nodded again and said, "That's good." He inclined his head thoughtfully. "It never sounded right, you know. It always sounded a bit affected, your trying to speak like all the other English girls."

Alice thought that was rather easy for him to say, considering that he had not been the one who had to deal with all the awkward staring her Scottish accent had provoked, even from the girls who hadn't made fun of her for it. But for some reason it made her smile. "It seemed like the right thing at the time," she said with a light shrug. He returned her smile weakly.

"I…heard Ashby told you about what your father did," he said after another pause. Alice decided to feign interest in the grass. This was not a topic she particularly wanted to revisit, but she supposed as one of her father's oldest friends he felt entitled to bring it up. "Would you believe me if I told you I was proud of him that day?"

"I can't see why," she said.

"Because he went himself," he replied. Personally Alice did not think that made much of a difference, but Mr. Phelps evidently thought it did. She did not have the energy for a debate right now. "I suppose you're not going to tell me where you're going now, are you?" he said.

Alice rubbed her arms. "We haven't decided yet," she answered honestly. Mr. Phelps sighed. He looked as though he thought she was lying but knew better than to expect anything else. Alice discovered she did not care whether he believed her or not.

"He'll let you down too." He nodded vaguely towards the cave. "That boy. He won't want to. But if you put all your trust in him, he'll lose it, or break it, or betray it."

Alice shivered. _I know. That isn't why I'm staying_, she wanted to say. But explaining why she was would have taken too long, and she did not think he would understand that it wasn't really one reason but hundreds of little ones that by themselves meant nothing at all but taken together made up a person she had decided she would rather not live without. It was not the kind of romance she had dreamed of as a girl. Certainly she did not love Uncas the way she had loved her father, the painful, worshipful love that almost always left her feeling empty. Uncas was no white knight, she did not need Mr. Phelps to tell her that. But white knights could fall. Uncas was dark and quiet and fragile with eyes like a lonely black sea and a voice like distant thunder and all those things made him _hers_. She did not think she could explain this to the doctor either, so she settled again for the simplest answer. "We'll get by."

"You're young. I suppose it's easier for you," Mr. Phelps said. He looked a little envious.

"It's easier not being alone," Alice admitted. She turned and put on the most cheerful smile she could, more for her sake than for his. "I suppose anything is bearable as long as you can be with the people you care about," she said, with a lightness that was not entirely feigned.

The doctor smiled bitterly. "That would be nice, wouldn't it?"

He shouldered the familiar beige satchel he always carried, with his needles and catgut and the other incisive tools of his trade. "Please tell Cora…" he began, and stopped. "Nothing. Tell her nothing." He adjusted his satchel with another heft and departed without looking back. Alice watched his figure shrink and dissolve into the dark blue shadows of predawn. He stumbled a little before the forest swallowed him.

* * *

Uncas woke before dawn, but still he was the last to rise. Nathaniel's heavy footsteps jerked him from slumber. His brother could be as light-footed as a deer when he needed to be, but relaxed he had always tended towards carelessness. The buzzing of whispers, a thousand times more irritating than a single voice, made it impossible for him to remain in the cave. But perhaps he left because he knew _she_ would be waiting for him outside. He was not at all surprised to find her there, tracing circles in the grass with her fingertips. It was impossible to tell if she had been sitting there a few minutes or an hour.

"It's going to snow soon, isn't it?" she asked as he approached, rubbing her arms.

"It already has snowed, little rabbit," he reminded her. Her cheeks colored, and he realized too late that she probably thought he was criticizing her. It made him wonder if they would ever be able to have a complete conversation without one of them misinterpreting the other.

"I know that," she answered in a quiet mumble. She began to massage her hands together in her lap. Uncas reached across and covered her chapped and brittle fingers with his own. _So small and so cold_, he thought. _Like a spring butterfly that lingered too long in autumn. This is no place for one such as you_. But then, that was for her to decide.

They had discussed very little regarding their future, such as it was. His brother had broached the possibility of wintering in Pennsylvania with their Mahican kin in one of the Moravian settlements the night before. The Moravian missionaries were used to mixed bloods and cultural misfits like Nathaniel. It would be easier on Alice, too, he knew, as many of the people there were more likely to accept a white girl and an Indian. She could be with her people, and he could be with his. It would not be a bad place to start a life together.

Alice shrugged when he mentioned it. "It's still just talk. They haven't made any decisions yet," she said. Her eyes surveyed his face carefully. "But you have, haven't you?"

He nodded. "I need to find my father. To…explain." She did not ask him what he needed to explain, and he did not elaborate. His mind was already imagining his father's reaction when he learned his only trueborn son had chosen a green-eyed girl with corn silk hair for his companion, a union that offered no guarantee except years of hardship for both of them. His father would be disappointed, that was also a guarantee. Disappointed that his son had opted to ruin his life and the life of the girl he professed to love. But putting it off would only make it more difficult.

Alice nodded. "I won't wait for you," she said. A look of stubborn defiance crossed her face, a look he found all the more enticing for its childishness, though he could never tell her that. He chuckled softly and ran his hand over her hair.

"It's a long walk to Ohio, little rabbit," he told her.

She folded her arms across her chest. "I will not wait," she repeated firmly.

He saw no choice but to accept her proposal, though he wondered if she had thought through all of the consequences. Their problems would not end once they caught up with his father. She already knew some of the migrating Lenape, but the Ohio Lenape were a different sort, and much less likely to harbor goodwill towards the British. His people were not the type to drive out a newcomer, especially on the brink of winter, but he wondered if she would be able to deal with several months of cold and silent stares. He wanted to believe he would be enough for her, as he had already decided she was enough for him.

Yet as he searched through the doubts in his mind, he found apprehension, but not regret. It was strange that all the things that were _wrong_ with her were the things that made being with her feel so right. He needed her sadness and her brokenness and the soft radiance of a smile that would always be tinged with sorrow. Gifts he suspected the frontier had imparted to her, or merely awakened after they had lain dormant during the years spent with her English relations. It occurred to him that he had never known Alice the innocent debutante; he had arrived five minutes too late for that. By the time he first saw her, she was already Alice the scarred child-woman. _Would I have cared about her this much if I had run into her six months ago in Albany? Would I have liked her at all?_ He pondered these questions a moment and then dismissed them. They would have enough to worry about answering the questions that did matter without dealing with the ones that didn't.

She rested her head against his shoulder. "Have you told your sister yet?" he asked.

She groaned softly and shook her head. "She knows, though," she murmured sleepily. "Cora always knows."

He chuckled again and brushed his lips against the side of her face. He supposed some might have called it angelic, even covered with streaks of dirt and a few strands of loose hair. He toyed with the idea for a moment and decided it did not fit. _To love an angel_, he thought absentmindedly, _would be very lonely_.

He pulled her closer and thought about the road ahead and the camps of his Ohio kin. For a moment he indulged himself with a picture of her golden hair tied back in braids and a string of blue beads cascading down her neck. Most marriages among his people did not involve a formal ceremony, but Alice would probably prefer one. Chingachgook would smile warmly at her, Nathaniel would clap him on the back with a good-natured jest about his creative method of finding a Delaware-speaking woman, and then they would dance, a wild, whirling dance in defiance of the frost and the winter and the inevitable turning of the world.

He let the vision hover in his mind, and then brushed it aside before it could collapse under its impossibility. Explaining their union to his father would be one of the easier tasks. Chingachgook would accept her as a daughter in time, but there were many more who would never acknowledge a family that included them both.

She turned back to the cave. The first rays of sunrise lit up the side of her face, painting her hair in streaks of amber and strawberry. For all her willowy, ephemeral beauty, there was a certain steel about her. Not the hard, unyielding kind Cora and Nathaniel wore. The frontier was made for people like his brother and his fiancée, people of fire and stone. Alice was all wind and water, light, fleeting and tractable, but quietly determined.

"We should go inside," he told her.

Alice shook her head. "Not yet," she said. "Just a little longer, please." She squeezed his hand and leaned backwards onto the grass. He lay down beside her, observing how their fingers wove in an interplay of copper and cream. _Are you the darker one inside? _Finding the answer might take a year, or ten, or ninety. He would not mind as long as she would let him share the darkness with her. A chill wind pricked the side of his face, carrying with it a warning of the deeper frost to come. As her gold hair mingled with his black, they stared at the sky in silence and waited for the arrival of the winter and the dawn.

* * *

_Author's Note: This is not the story I planned to write. When I first envisioned a world where Alice and Uncas had a second chance, they were together for the entirety, and Uncas was able to watch her grow and help her out of her psychotic depression. Then - to be honest - I got scared. I was captivated by the idea that Uncas could see Alice in all her fragile, catatonic glory and love her as she was. But in that state I didn't believe Alice was ready to love anyone, and I worried that she would see Uncas only as a lifeline, or a savior. Alice's life has already been populated with many saviors, who protected her out of either love or duty. I wanted something more for them. I hoped to move Alice from a relationship based on adoration (i.e. her father) to one based on affection – which meant being able to recognize and embrace the weakness in the other. So instead Uncas met her halfway. Because he respected her enough to tell her the truth, he would get to disillusion her but not save her._

_If there are any Fruits Basket fans reading this, I would be lying if I didn't admit drawing a great deal of inspiration from the Yuki/Machi dynamic. Most especially Machi's line that so horrified the Prince Yuki fan club: "The president isn't at all like a prince...he makes things lonely." There will be more times when Alice will require saving, and Uncas will have opportunities to prove himself. But she will never see him as the brave hero of a Gothic romance. To her he will always be the lonely-eyed Mahican who once gave her an honest answer._

_Thanks to EmeraldCoast, because I was never able to thank you for your reviews personally, and to everyone who stayed with me while writing this._

_-bethsaida_


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